general question about "intra tumor heterogeneity"

Question

[imagineyd]

Dear All,

I wonder that there are references or any literature about "intra tumor heterogeneity" in cancer types.

Are there some discussion or evidences which cancer type shows the most heterogeneity or vise verse?

Any kinds of comments are very welcome :)

Thanks!

Answer 1

[Chris Miller]

The short answer is that in most tumor types, most tumors display some amount of subclonal heterogeneity. It's everywhere, and low-frequency events are not being well captured in our standard 50-100x tumor assays.

Update: I can tell you from personal experience that when looking at close to 1000 exomes from TCGA, most (60%+) have detectable subclonal mutations, and I'd wager that most of the rest just didn't have sufficient coverage to uncover additional low-VAF populations. Very few tumors are actually monoclonal.

[Chris Miller]

If you're looking for specific cross-cancer comparisons of subclonal mutations, you could do worse than some of the work that my colleagues at TGI did here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v502/n7471/full/nature12634.html

Answer 2

[a.polo88]

I think that you can start with these two references:

• http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa1113205
• http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304419X09000742 (payment try to search free)

but I agree with chris miller

[a.polo88]

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304419X09000742