NIMG-87. CHARACTERIZING IMMUNE PROFILES OF PEDIATRIC MEDULLOBLASTOMA AND THEIR RADIOLOGICAL CORRELATES

Abstract

Abstract Recent studies have shown preliminary evidence for differentiation of the tumor microenvironment (TME) and immune landscape between molecularly-defined medulloblastoma (MB) subtypes. Identifying radiological correlates of these TME patterns could establish a non-invasive method of immune profile characterization for guiding patient-centered therapies. Here, we examine immune profiles between MB subtypes using data from Open Pediatric Brain Tumor Atlas (OpenPBTA), and their relationship to tumor measurements from pre-operative MRIs. We identified a retrospective cohort of 94 pediatric MB patients with available molecular subtyping and immune profiles (36 cell types) from bulk gene expression data. A random forest analysis was used to classify the four MB subtypes based on immune profiles. Four cell types had high impact on classification performance: plasmacytoid dendritic cells (PDC; 25.8% accuracy decrease when randomized), hematopoietic stem cells (HSC; 21.9%), plasma B cells (20.3%), and cancer associated fibroblasts (18.8%). Pairwise comparisons revealed SHH and WNT tumors had significantly higher numbers of fibroblasts and HSCs compared to Group3/Group4. We also found novel evidence for significantly lower amounts of plasma B cells in the SHH group, and high PDC levels in Group4, followed by Group3, and low PDC in SHH/WNT. Multi-parametric MRI scans for 39 patients were used to segment tumor volumes. Overall tumor volume was significantly correlated with composite stroma scores (R = 0.34, p = 0.036). Additionally, patients with higher volumes of gadolinium contrast-enhancing compared to non-enhancing components had higher immune (R = 0.42, p = 0.009) and microenvironment (summed immune and stromal cell types; R = 0.44, p = 0.006) scores, regardless of their molecular subtype. Together, our results demonstrate: (1) the use of rich immune profiles for differentiating molecular subtypes of MB and their unique TME characterization; and (2) initial evidence for radiological correlates of these profiles based on pre-operative imaging collected through standard practices.