What Is Tumor Heterogeneity?
Posted: Fri Jan 08, 2016 7:59 pm
Summary
Understanding tumor heterogeneity may be the next big quest in cancer science, as differences between cells within a tumor can have important consequences for how cancers are diagnosed and treated.
Every person’s cancer develops and grows in its own way and is unique in terms of what therapies it’s sensitive to. At Memorial Sloan Kettering and at other research centers around the world, the push is on to characterize the molecular variations between tumors — known as inter-tumor heterogeneity — and offer individualized treatments to more patients. That alone is a massive task.
And yet, according to some scientists, understanding how one person’s tumor differs from another’s may not be enough. Among those researchers is Memorial Sloan Kettering biologist Scott W. Lowe, who chairs the Cancer Biology and Genetics Program and the Geoffrey Beene Cancer Research Center. He thinks the next big quest in cancer science will be to peer ever more deeply into the genetics and biology of individual patients’ diseases and explore variations between subpopulations of tumor cells.
“We are increasingly becoming aware of the problem of intra-tumor heterogeneity, the fact that one person’s tumor cells can vary depending on where in the body they are located,” he says. “Even within the same tumor from the same patient, tumor cells might be subtly or even dramatically different. And there can be very important implications of this type of heterogeneity
https://www.mskcc.org/blog/what-tumor-heterogeneity
Understanding tumor heterogeneity may be the next big quest in cancer science, as differences between cells within a tumor can have important consequences for how cancers are diagnosed and treated.
Every person’s cancer develops and grows in its own way and is unique in terms of what therapies it’s sensitive to. At Memorial Sloan Kettering and at other research centers around the world, the push is on to characterize the molecular variations between tumors — known as inter-tumor heterogeneity — and offer individualized treatments to more patients. That alone is a massive task.
And yet, according to some scientists, understanding how one person’s tumor differs from another’s may not be enough. Among those researchers is Memorial Sloan Kettering biologist Scott W. Lowe, who chairs the Cancer Biology and Genetics Program and the Geoffrey Beene Cancer Research Center. He thinks the next big quest in cancer science will be to peer ever more deeply into the genetics and biology of individual patients’ diseases and explore variations between subpopulations of tumor cells.
“We are increasingly becoming aware of the problem of intra-tumor heterogeneity, the fact that one person’s tumor cells can vary depending on where in the body they are located,” he says. “Even within the same tumor from the same patient, tumor cells might be subtly or even dramatically different. And there can be very important implications of this type of heterogeneity
https://www.mskcc.org/blog/what-tumor-heterogeneity
