Molecular biology of medulloblastoma: will it ever make a difference to clinical management?

Over the last 10 years approximately 750 children with medulloblastoma have been treated on consortia based clinical trials at an estimated cost of over 150 million US dollars. Despite this enormous effort, no meaningful molecular data has been generated that will inform the next generation of clinical studies. It is imperative that the neuro-oncology community give greater priority to studies of medulloblastoma molecular biology: unless we do this our patients will face a bleak future in which there is no accurate disease-risk stratification tool and no effective new treatments. We review some of the reasons we have failed to translate knowledge of medulloblastoma disease biology to the clinic and look forward to the next generation of clinical and molecular studies that are seeking to correct this.