Chordomas: What's New?

the importance of the expression of the transcriptionalregulator, brachyury, that was used by the authors as a markerfor the diagnosis of chordoma should be emphasized. Studieshave identified a common gene duplication of brachyury inpatients with familial and sporadic chordoma. Furthermore, it hasbeen recently shown that brachyury silencing results in completegrowth arrest and senescence of chordoma tumor cells in vitro(7). These interesting findings outline the potential role of bra-chyury as a target of biomolecular therapeutic interventions, inparticular because it seems to be common and specific to allchordomas.