NEW YORK — Using sequencing data, researchers characterized intra-tumor heterogeneity of more than three dozen cancer types, finding subclonal populations among most of the cancer types analyzed.
Tumor cells accumulate somatic mutations, some of which provide advantages and lead those cells to expand. Characterizing intra-tumor heterogeneity, though, has been challenging due to the need to disentangle signals from various cancer cells and even nearby non-cancer cells in bulk tumor samples in combination with the sheer number of tumor samples that need to be characterized.