Abstract
Adamantinomatous Craniopharyngioma (ACP) imparts a significant impact on quality of life. It presents with a bimodal age distribution, with distinct pediatric and adult cohorts. Current canonical therapies of surgery and radiation are associated with short and long-term morbidity. Recent research has demonstrated potential therapeutic targets within pediatric ACP that may offer tumor growth control coupled with a decrease in treatment morbidity. To investigate if therapies identified in pediatric ACP may have efficacy in adult ACP, we performed transcriptional analysis of 28 pediatric and 8 adult ACP samples. Transforming data in order to favor identifying differential expression patterns across all magnitudes of transcriptional expression yielded no clear expression differences that differentiate adult versus pediatric patients. Further analysis examining recently identified therapeutic targets such as SRC and SHH also failed to identify discernible differences between the adult and pediatric cohorts. Geneset Enrichment Analysis (GSEA) identified statistically significant pathway enrichment between cohorts, although clustering based on enriched pathways also yielded no clear pattern. Our results demonstrate that adult and pediatric ACP patients possess similar basic transcriptional profiles, especially related to identified therapeutic targets; thus indicating that potential novel treatments should be considered for further investigation in both pediatric and adult cohorts.