Alberto J. Schuhmacher
ARAID researcher and head of the Molecular Oncology Group at the Aragón Health Research Institute (IIS Aragón)
The work is fascinating and very robust. In recent years we have seen how tumours that looked like the same disease to us, when looked at under the microscope, had different genetic alterations and could therefore be treated differently with greater success. Furthermore, we have learned that a tumour is heterogeneous and not all cancer cells within the same tumour are the same. This diversity, this intratumoural heterogeneity, allows some tumour cells to survive some treatments and yet be sensitive to others. In cancer, Darwinian evolution takes place in a 'beastly' way. The 'natural selection' of tumour cells is to adapt to the microenvironment, avoid the immune system and resist new treatments in order to survive, grow larger and progress.
The TRACERx study seeks to understand how different clones or cell populations within a tumour evolve in response to treatments. This work published today focuses on lung cancers and sheds light on how different cell clones of tumours evolve as a function of treatments and how they evolve as the disease progresses, the risk of recurrence or how they progress to metastasis. They show that tumour progression is influenced by tumour heterogeneity and should help in the near future and influence the more rational selection of treatments and the search for new therapies.
One of the papers has established a new technology based on liquid biopsy, which allows the DNA of a tumour to be read from a blood sample, which could help to establish the metastatic potential of these tumours. This breakthrough will be important to develop new therapeutic strategies and clinical trials to search for new therapies and approaches.