Diffuse intrinsic pontine gliomas (DIPG) are the most severe pediatric brain tumours. Though accepted as the main therapeutic, radiotherapy is only transiently efficient and not even in every patient. We previously identified a heterogeneous response to radiotherapy at diagnosis (Castel et al., 2015). The aim of the project was to define the mechanisms of radioresistance.First, we assessed in vitro response to ionizing radiations in a collection of DIPG cellular models derived from treatment-naïve biopsies and we uncovered TP53 mutation as the main driver of increased radioresistance. We validated this finding in 4 isogenic pairs of DIPG cells with TP53WT and TP53KD. Then, we demonstrated with an extended cohort of 73 DIPG patients that mutated TP53 patients had a poor response to radiotherapy. Using a kinome-wide synthetic lethality RNAi screen, we further identified target genes that can sensitize TP53MUT DIPG to ionizing radiations. CHK1 inhibition increases response to radiation specifically in TP53MUT cells and could be considered as a new therapeutic approach in this setting. Finally, we established in vitro radioresistant DIPG cells to study tumour relapse and we developed tools to model post-radiotherapy relapse through the study of clonal dynamics using single cell RGB marking.In all, this results go further in the understanding of the DIPG radioresistance. We demonstrated that a TP53 alteration is a theranostic marker to predict radioresistance and we opened new therapeutic opportunities in combination with radiotherapy for the treatment of this pediatric disease, which remains incurable.