Anita Sveen’s project group publish in Nature Communications
The Computational Oncology project group has in collaboration with additional members of the Lothe group and clinical partners at OUH published a study on transcriptomic tumor heterogeneity of colorectal cancers.
Gene expression analysis of approximately 1,100 samples from primary tumors and liver metastases of 700 patients treated at OUH was used to define patterns of heterogeneous and uniform expression across tumor regions. High intra-tumor heterogeneity was associated with a poor patient survival, attributed to stromal infiltration of the tumor microenvironment. Low-heterogeneity signals were cancer cell-intrinsic, and tumor classification based on these signals recapitulated intrinsic subtypes from single-cell sequencing. The low-heterogeneity approach enabled classification into congruent consensus molecular subtypes, and had a stronger impact on patient prognosis than intra-tumor heterogeneity. Switching of the subtypes between patient-matched primary tumors and metastases demonstrated phenotypic plasticity of the cancer cells during metastasis, suggesting that it is difficult to reconcile tumor classifications of primary and metastatic colorectal cancers.
Jonas Langerud (PhD student and first author), Anita Sveen (project group leader), Solveig MK Klokkerud (PhD student), and Hossein Moosavi (postdoc).
Links:
The Nature Communications article:
Langerud J, Eilertsen IA, Moosavi SH, Klokkerud SMK, Reims HM, Backe IF, Hektoen M, Sjo OH, Jeanmougin M, Tejpar S, Nesbakken A, Lothe RA, Sveen A (2024)
Multiregional transcriptomics identifies congruent consensus subtypes with prognostic value beyond tumor heterogeneity of colorectal cancer
Nat Commun, 15 (1), 4342
DOI 10.1038/s41467-024-48706-2, PubMed 38773143
Anita Sveen's project group: Computational Oncology
Ragnhild A. Lothe's Genetics group