Diffuse midline glioma (DMG) is a highly aggressive and fatal pediatric high-grade glioma that primarily affects critical regions of the central nervous system, such as the pons, thalamus, and spinal cord. Due to the high surgical risks and poor prognosis associated with DMG, treatment options for patients are extremely limited. Conventional treatments, including surgery, radiotherapy, and chemotherapy, have shown limited efficacy , particularly with radiochemotherapy, which only temporarily controls tumor progression without significantly extending patient survival.
Most patients succumb to the disease within two years of diagnosis, and effective therapeutic strategies are currently lacking. One of the key pathological features of DMG is the lysine-to-methionine mutation at position 27 of histone H3 (H3K27M), which disrupts the epigenomic regulation of cells and drives rapid cancer progression. Studies have shown that epigenetic therapies can reprogram histone modifications in DMG tumor cells, thereby suppressing the expression of genes associated with tumor progression.
However, the scarcity of DMG samples and the complexity of culturing tumor cells have hindered progress in both research and treatment. In response, the researchers developed HiTIP-seq, a microarray-based high-throughput in situ tagged immunoprecipitation sequencing technology. Compared to traditional chromatin immunoprecipitation sequencing (ChIP-seq), HiTIP-seq enables high-throughput retrieval of high-qua.