GI highlights from the literature

Basic scienceIntratumour heterogeneity and genomic instability as a marker of patient prognosis  Andor N, Graham TA, Jansen M, et al. Pan-cancer analysis of the extent and consequences of tumour heterogeneity. Nat Med 2016;22:105–13. Intratumour heterogeneity is one of the current cancer research hot topics. The observation that tumours are composed of a large number of diverse clones has provided a potential explanation as to why cancers are hard to treat—the likelihood that a therapeutic resistant clone can evolve is high. However, there is no consensus on the consequence of tumour heterogeneity on the prognosis of patients because previous studies have relied on single sample sequencing of moderate depth. In this article, Andor and colleagues use mixture-separation algorithms such as EXPANDS (‘Expanding Ploidy and Allele frequency on NesteD populationS’), to model the cellular prevalence of each single nucleotide variant as a copy number-dependent probability distribution. Another algorithm (PyClone)...
Source: Gut - Category: Gastroenterology Authors: Tags: JournalScan Source Type: research