DNA Methylation Profiling: A Groundbreaking Diagnostic Tool for Brain Tumors

Northwestern Medicine is now one of few institutions worldwide to use methylation profiling for the diagnosis of brain tumors. In this video, Craig M. Horbinski, MD, PhD, director of Neuropathology and professor of Neurological Surgery at Northwestern Medicine, discusses the details of this groundbreaking diagnostic tool.

“Methylation profiling is proving to be absolutely transformative because in many cases tumors we thought that were one thing under the microscope, and even sometimes by sequencing, ended up having a very different methylation signature than we originally anticipated,” says Dr. Horbinski. “And as a result, we've actually discovered new types of tumor entities that we didn't even know existed.”