16th February 2024 Heidelberg University in collaboration with The German Research Foundation (DFG) and MPAI organised The Leibniz Lecture, “Democratizing access to state-of-the art molecular diagnostics across the globe"

Heidelberg University in collaboration with The German Research Foundation (DFG) and MPAI organised the prestigious Leibniz Lecture, “Democratizing access to state-of-the art molecular diagnostics across the globe". In his talk, Prof. Pfister talked about the concept of methylation-based classification of CNS tumors and devising a sarcoma classifier and how the continued research efforts of the Heidelberg Team have resulted in pivotal changes of the WHO classification during the last couple of years.

The WHO Classification of CNS Tumors 2021 recommends epigenomic analysis (DNA methylation) as an integral part of diagnosis for a variety of tumor types, and the WHO Classification of Pediatric Tumors 2022 has also adopted this requirement. Despite the fact that the classifiers of CNS tumors and sarcoma are publicly available online for no cost (www.molecularneuropathology.org) and have been utilized for ~130.000 tumor samples worldwide, their widespread adoption, especially in low-to-middle-income countries (LMICs) have been limited. This is primarily due to the relatively high setup costs for methylation platforms and their associated consumables, together with lacking the needed expertise to run the wet-lab as well as bioinformatics analysis.

The well received lecture had over 200 scientific experts from all across India and created outreach and visibility.