Cancer heterogeneity

[Tridimity]

Well, I've been pointing out the heterogeneity problem for ages, at last it is getting some attention:

 

Cancer diversity has 'huge implications'

A single tumour can be made up of many separate cancers needing different treatments, say researchers.

A team at the Institute of Cancer Research, London, have developed a new technique for measuring the diversity within a cancer.

They showed "extraordinary" differences between cancerous cells and say new targeted drugs may fail as they may be unable to kill all the mutated tissue.

Experts said the findings would have "profound implications" for treatments.

A tumour starts as a single cell, which acquires mutations and eventually divides uncontrollably. But that is not the end of the process.

Cancerous cells continue to mutate and become more aggressive, move round the body and resist drugs. This process is chaotic and results in a "diverse" tumour containing cancerous cells that have mutated in different ways.

"This has huge implications for medicine," researcher Prof Mel Greaves told the BBC.

His team at the Institute of Cancer Research investigated cancer diversity in five children with leukaemia. They compared mutations in individual cancerous cells with a known database of mutations.

Their results, published in the journal Genome Research, showed patients had between two and 10 genetically distinct leukaemias.

Prof Greaves said: "Every patient has a completely new tree and doesn't have one cancer, they have multiple cancers.

"This is really a technical advance to get at this extraordinary complex diversity, it helps explain why we have such difficulty with advanced diseases.

"The bottom line is we need to understand cancer diversity to limit further adaptations, reduce the pace of evolution and prolong the activity of drugs”

Prof Charles Swanton

 

UCL

 

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-24957089

[CharonY]

To be fair, this is a well-recognized issue in cancer research (discussed at least since the 80s) and numerous groups are involved in developing analytical methods to resolve (cancer) cell heterogeneity.

It is less discussed in the medical area as MDs had no good tools to assess this issue and hence have no way to incorporate that into diagnostics/therapeutics.

Now that single-cell analysis is getting traction I assume that after fixing some hitches more detailed information on basic cell heterogeneity will forthcoming in the near future.

[sialic acid]

Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?

 

I'm still a firm believer in Warburg's initial hypothesis that metabolic alteration is one of the primary drivers of genetic mutation (not the other way around, but of course that's debatable) which eventually leads to cancer tumors with heterogeneities, stem cell like characteristics, and the ability to metastasize. Either way, energy metabolism, at least IMO still remains a very viable target for cancer therapy that will be very hard for a cancer cell to become resistant to if you know where to target.

Edited December 1, 2013 by sialic acid