BioCentury
ARTICLE | Translation in Brief

Cell by cell

There's more to tumor heterogeneity than mutations

June 9, 2016 7:00 AM UTC

Although it's well-established that individual cancer cells can harbor mutations that help them resist therapy, researchers have just begun looking at how non-genetic variations can affect treatment outcomes. A team of scientists from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard is drilling into the transcriptional signatures of single cells from human cancers with the hope of predicting resistance to targeted drugs and immunotherapies.

In a study in Science, the team analyzed whole-exome RNA sequencing data for 4,645 individual cells from 19 melanoma patient tumor samples, and showed each tumor contained some fraction of cells whose transcriptional profiles were associated with resistance to MEK and BRAF inhibitors, regardless of the patient's mutational background or treatment history...