Deconstruction of Medulloblastoma Cellular Heterogeneity Reveals Differences between the Most Highly Invasive and Self-Renewing Phenotypes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Medulloblastoma (MB) is the most common malignant primary pediatric brain tumor. Major research efforts have focused on characterizing and targeting putative brain tumor stem or propagating cell populations from the tumor mass. However, less is known about the relationship between these cells and highly invasive MB cells that evade current therapies. Here, we dissected MB cellular heterogeneity and directly compared invasion and self-renewal. Analysis of higher versus lower self-renewing tumor spheres and stationary versus migrating adherent MB cells revealed differential expression of the cell surface markers CD271 [p75 neurotrophin receptor (p75NTR)] and CD133. Cell sorting demonstrated that CD271 selects for subpopulations with a higher capacity for self-renewal, whereas CD133 selects for cells exhibiting increased invasion in vitro. CD271 expression is higher in human fetal cerebellum and primary samples of the Shh MB molecular variant and lower in the more aggressive, invasive group 3 and 4 subgroups. Global gene expression analysis of higher versus lower self-renewing MB tumor spheres revealed down-regulation of a cell movement transcription program in the higher self-renewing state and a novel potential role for axon guidance signaling in MB-propagating cells. We have identified a cell surface signature based on CD133/CD271 expression that selects for MB cells with a higher self-renewal potential or invasive capacity in vitro. Our study underscores a previously unappreciated role for CD271 in selecting for MB cell phenotypes and suggests that successful treatment of pediatric brain tumors requires concomitant targeting of a spectrum of transitioning self-renewing and highly infiltrative cell subpopulations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".