Iroquois transcription factors are perturbed in diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma.
The brain cancer diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG) is the most fatal of all cancers with a 5-year survival rate of less than 1%, meaning greater than 99% of patients diagnosed with DIPG will expire within 5 years (1). Systems-level analyses of the cancer transcriptome compared to the tissue from which it arises presents a unique opportunity to gain insights into the transcriptional behavior of each cancer and how it differs from its tissue of origin (2). In this study I used published microarray data to compare the DIPG tumor transcirptomes to that of the normal brain (3). In both datasets, I found differential expression of an Iroquois transcription factor in DIPG tumors: in one dataset, IRX2, IRX5 and IRX3 were among the most differentially expressed genes in the tumors of patients with DIPG, and in a separate dataset, IRX4 was significantly differentially expressed when compared to control brain tissues. IRX proteins may be important molecules in the biology of diffuse intrinsic pontine gliomas.