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Overview

Osteosarcoma is the most common malignant bone tumor in children. Although advances in chemotherapy have improved survival dramatically, patients whose tumor has spread (metastasized) to the lungs or bones still have a much lower chance of survival of their disease. To date, the presence of metastases and the responsiveness of the primary tumor to pre-surgical chemotherapy are the most powerful predictors of outcome. Research is actively being done to find out how the tumor will respond to chemotherapy before surgery to remove the tumor. There is a clinical need to identify as early as possible if a patient will fail standard therapy and would benefit from more intensive or alternative treatments. To be able to do this research, we are creating one of the largest specimen banks of blood (serum/plasma) from healthy children and adults, as well as children and young adults with osteosarcoma. These blood samples will be analyzed at the Indiana University School of Medicine Protein Analysis and Research Center.

A database for the specimen bank was developed by the Regenstrief Institute, in collaboration with the National Cancer Institute Bioinformatics Grid (caBIG), to allow for data integration of clinical data with many different research areas. To understand these high dimensional datasets, novel algorithms and statistical methods and highly sophisticated information visualization methods are currently being developed as part of this project.