Explain how cancers grow

by time news

Understand how a cancer develops from its earliest stages and determine what cells give rise to the different elements involved in the development of a cancer can improve our understanding of how a tumor has grown and developed, including how it has changed genetically, over time.

Now British researchers, thanks to a new technique called spatial transcriptomics, have been able to see what genetic changes occur without breaking the tissue they are looking at. This adds a new dimension that researchers have now used to reveal which cells have mutated and where within an organ’s ecosystem.

Current techniques for studying the genetics of tumor cells consist of taking a sample from the cancerous area and analyzing the DNA of those cells. The problem is that many cancers, such as prostate cancer, are three-dimensional, which means that a single sample would only give a small snapshot of the tumor.

Many cancers are three-dimensional, which means that a single sample would only give a small snapshot of the tumor.

In this new study published in Nature, the researchers used spatial transcriptomics to create a cross-sectional map of the entire prostate, including areas of healthy and cancerous cells. By grouping the cells according to a similar genetic identity, they were surprised to see areas of supposedly healthy tissue that already had many of the genetic characteristics of cancer. This finding was surprising both because of the genetic variability within the tissue and because of the large number of cells that would be considered healthy, but which contained mutations normally identified with cancer cells.

Alastair Lamb, from Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences, who co-led the study, explains: “Prostate tissue is three-dimensional and, like most organs that can develop cancer, we still have a lot to learn about it. what cell changes cause cancer and where it starts. One thing we’re pretty sure of is that it starts with genetic mutations.”

“We’ve never had this level of resolution before, and this new approach revealed some amazing results. For example, we have discovered that many of the copy number events previously thought to be specifically linked to cancer are already present in the benign tissue. This has big implications for diagnosis and also potentially for deciding which parts of a cancer should be treated,’ he adds.

For Joakim Lundeberg, from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), “the mapping of thousands of tissue regions in a single experiment is an unprecedented approach to restore the signals of the heterogeneity of tumors and their microenvironment. This high-resolution vision influences how we approach complex ecosystems like cancer. The possibility of identifying early events is particularly exciting going forward.”

In addition, the researchers analyzed more than 150,000 regions in three prostate cancers, two breast cancers, some skin, a lymph node, and some brain tissue, and developed an algorithm to track groups of cells with similar genetic changes — clones — in your precise location.

This method allowed them to zoom from visible tissue through microscopic multicellular structures and down to the genes themselves, without losing sight of the larger landscape of the tissue.

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