Internet Application Furthers Pediatric Cancer Research

An interactive web application and dataset that is a powerful tool to advance understanding of oncogenic mutations is available free of charge to pediatric cancer researchers.

The ProteinPaint web application was developed and is maintained by investigators at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital (Memphis, TN, USA). ProteinPaint integrates mutation information from multiple datasets obtained from the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, the Washington University (St. Louis, MO, USA) Pediatric Cancer Genome Project, the [US] National Cancer Institute's (Bethesda, MD, USA) Therapeutically Applicable Research to Generate Effective Treatments (TARGET) initiative, and other published pediatric cancer studies.

Having access to this vast data base enables the program to identify mutations that are present only at diagnosis or at relapse, and to indicate whether the mutations occur in almost every cell (germline) or just cancer cells (somatic).

The ProteinPaint program, which was described in the December 29, 2015, online edition of the journal Nature Genetics, currently includes information on almost 27,500 mutations discovered in more than 1,000 pediatric patients with 21 cancer subtypes.

"Each day brings new information about mutations that drive human cancer. Novel tools are essential to help scientists use this wealth of genomic data to advance research and find new cures," said senior author Dr. Jinghui Zhang, professor of computational biology at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. "We developed ProteinPaint as an intuitive tool any scientist can easily use to explore the vast amount of information now available on cancer genomics."

"ProteinPaint's focus on pediatric cancer and presentation of mutations at the gene level complements existing cancer genome data portals," said Dr. Zhang. "For St. Jude, the application is the foundation for developing a global reference database for information about pediatric cancer."

Related Links:
ProteinPaint - available to researchers free of charge
St. Jude Children's Research Hospital
Washington University