The Children’s Oncology Group and QuadW Foundation osteosarcoma banking experience.

Abstract

10053 Background: Survival rates of osteosarcoma patients have remained stagnant over the last twenty years. Predictive biomarkers of response to treatment and likelihood of recurrence are yet to be developed. In order to develop new therapeutics and better risk-stratified regimens, a greater understanding of osteosarcoma biology is needed. The Children’s Oncology Group (COG) addressed this need by banking more than 10,000 tumor and tissue samples from over 1500 patients with osteosarcoma, but many samples lacked clinically relevant data. Methods: 1105 eligible patients enrolled on the COG osteosarcoma biology study P9851. Of those, 510 patients were not enrolled on a concurrent therapeutic trial, which limited the clinical annotation of those samples. 589 patients have enrolled on the successor study AOST06B1. The lack of clinical annotation of the P9851 specimens limited their value, and the lack of statistical support slowed the analysis of several biology studies. The QuadW Foundation, CureSearch, and the COG formed the Childhood Sarcoma Biostatistics and Annotation Office (CSBAO) in 2008 to link clinically annotated patient data to the samples and to provide statistical support. Results: In 2008, only 5.3% of samples from the 510 P9851 patients not enrolled on a therapeutic study had full clinical annotation. The efforts of the CSBAO have linked clinical annotation to 90.8% of those specimens and provided statistical analyses. As a result, 18 biology studies in osteosarcoma are completed, with 11 published in peer-reviewed journals. Samples were provided to the TARGET program (for gene expression arrays, copy number analysis, and sequencing data); the resulting data will be available to the scientific community for in silico studies. Conclusions: The efforts of the CSBAO have led to a substantial increase in the value of a large osteosarcoma biospecimen repository by clinically annotating the specimens and providing statistical resources for analyses of planned and completed studies. These samples with annotated patient information are available by request to the research community for basic and translational science projects to improve the biological understanding of, and the treatment of patients with osteosarcoma. Clinical trial information: NCT00899275.