The most common type of brain tumor, meningioma, grows from the membranes surrounding the brain and spinal cord.
Usually they are benign, which means they are not cancerous.
However, a subset of meningiomas behave aggressively, recur rapidly despite surgery and radiation, and often cause death.
To guess whether a tumor will be benign or malignant, pathologists typically examine a surgically removed sample of a tumor under the microscope and look for irregular cell shape, accelerated cell division, and other tell-tale signs of cancer.
But the eyeball test doesn’t always work.
Some stealthy tumors appear benign under the microscope but are just as aggressive and deadly as the malignant ones that look the part.
“The problem was they just kept coming back and people died of them,” said brain cancer surgeon Eric Holland, MD, PhD, who directs the Human Biology Division at Fred Hutch Cancer Center and holds the Endowed Chair in Cancer Biology. “There’s more going on than just the way it looks.”
Holland and his team at Fred Hutch have figured out a new way to classify tumors based on their underlying biology rather than their appearance under a microscope.
Holland’s team identified multiple subtypes that share similar genetics, including particularly aggressive clusters where stealthy tumors mislabeled “benign” fit right in with the deadly ones.
Their approach — described in a recent study that made the cover of the journal Cell Genomics —could improve meningioma diagnosis and could even guide treatment when applied to other solid-tumor diseases such as lung and breast cancer.
Stealth tumors that beat the eyeball test
The World Health Organization classifies meningiomas into three grades of severity based on how the tumor samples look under the microscope.
- Grade 1 tumors are benign, which means they typically grow slowly in one place with defined borders and don’t pose an immediate threat. Some of them may not be discovered until the patient dies of something else.
- Grade 2 tumors are atypical and require more scrutiny because they could become cancerous.
- Grade 3 tumors are malignant, which means they can invade nearby tissues and spread to other parts of the body.
“All of those are just words to try to describe what you think is going to happen with a tumor once you take it out,” Holland said.
Will the tumor disappear or does it keep coming back, even after surgery and radiation?
Grade 3 tumors usually turn out to be as malignant as they look under the microscope. Cut them out and they come back. Blast them with radiation and they come back.
But some of the grade 1 and grade 2 tumors come back just as aggressively, and they don’t show any signs of having transformed into grade 3 tumors.
They still look benign under the microscope, even as they are killing the patient.
“There’s a bunch of grade 1s and 2s that also behave badly, and it wasn’t the least bit clear to anybody why,” Holland said.
Grabbing all the big data sets out there
Holland’s team, including the study’s lead author, Heshani “Nayanga” Thirimanne, PhD, a graduate research assistant at Fred Hutch, had a clue about where to start looking for answers.
A disorder called neurofibromatosis type 2 (NF2) attracted their attention because it is characterized by the loss of a copy of the NF2 gene, which plays a role in tumor-suppression.
When NF2 is missing, meningiomas proliferate, typically affecting the main nerve between the inner ear and the brain, leading to hearing loss and deafness.
Usually, NF2 goes missing because of the loss of chromosome 22, which harbors it, but it can also lose its function in other ways.
Because the majority of rapidly recurrent meningiomas are among those that show functional loss of NF2, the team wanted to understand the overall pattern of gene expression (which genes are turned on and off) in this aggressive subset so they could predict which tumors will fall into that category.
They started with 279 meningioma samples gathered in collaboration with Manuel Ferreira, MD, PhD, in the Department of Neurosurgery at the University of Washington, who also treats patients at Fred Hutch. The samples were graded 1, 2 or 3 and annotated with clinical histories about the kinds of treatment that patients received and whether that treatment worked.
“We actually know who ended up having to get another resection six months later,” Holland said.
They sequenced the UW tumors using a method that measures average gene expression across all samples, providing a comprehensive analysis of nearly 20,000 genes that provide the instructions for making proteins, the molecules that do most of the work in the cell.
Then they combined their UW data with a dozen publicly available meningioma datasets sequenced in the same way from nine institutions and five countries in North America, Europe and Asia.
This enabled them to amass the field’s largest meningioma dataset to date, comprising nearly 1,300 tumors sampled from patients all over the world combined with detailed clinical treatment histories for many of those cases.
“Basically, we grabbed all the big data sets out there,” Holland said. “The more you have, the better.”