Researchers at the University of Louisville have just published the Atlas of Nervous System Tumors, a collection of thousands of brain tumor samples and their genetic information from around the world.

The ability to compare and contrast the data from rare cancers could improve the way we treat them.

More about that.

And tonight's medical news.

What we've done is stitched together about 7000, slightly over 7000 different brain tumor samples to create this atlas that scientists or clinicians or anyone who's interested can use to understand how brain tumors differ from one another based on the genes that they contain or express.

I doing that, they may be able to translate a therapy that works well for one tumor to another, or by understanding the genes that are expressed in those tumors, they may be able to identify therapies or match therapies that work really, really well based on the gene expression patterns.

The reason we ended up doing this is the state of Kentucky has one of the highest brain tumor incidences of all states.

That is especially true for children.

In fact, brain tumors are one of the most common types of tumors of cancers that children, have in the state of Kentucky.

And so that was the impetus.

If you look at all the organs that are in the human body, right.

The brain is one that has among the most diverse or the most numerous brain cancers.

In fact, there are over 50 brain cancers.

And so it is hard to know what the behavior of those rare brain tumors is and what therapy may work without having a large amount of data for that rare tumor.

I don't think this atlas is going to immediately translate into, hey, I have this rare tumor, and I think this therapy is, you know, matches your, you know, the pattern, the gene expression pattern.

And so we should give you that therapy.

I don't think it will jump that quickly to clinical translation.

But what it can do is open avenues to safely test those therapies or start testing those therapies.

We actually undertook one of those investigations ourselves.

We focused on a rare nervous system tumor.

And we found that, you know, within that one tumor, there are six different subtypes that nobody, clearly were able to decipher or see.

And one of them, had a very unique genetic and gene expression signature, such and some of the genes that it was expressing.

There are therapies right now that target that.

And so we're excited, you know, by the potential of Atlas to be able to lead to discoveries, to speed up therapy generation, for even rare tumors.

This project was funded by the state of Kentucky, and the database is online and free to access by the public.