Pediatric Clival Chordoma: A Case Series and Rationale for Next-Generation Sequencing

Background Clival chordoma is very rare in the pediatric population. Current standard treatment includes gross total resection with adjuvant radiotherapy, and current systemic therapies have shown limited clinical efficacy. Our group previously sequenced several adult chordoma tumors, finding aberrations implicating the PI3K/PTEN/AKT and STAT-3 pathways in pathogenesis. To this effect, we aim to study the pediatric chordoma population to discover both clinical and genetic differences in this population.