Patchwork Solutions

There's great strength in diversity. Unfortunately that applies to cancer as well as people. A major challenge in tackling tumours is their variability, both within tumours and between them. Their unpredictable combination of characteristics makes finding a single effective treatment difficult. Recent studies have described this inconsistency by analysing different cells from tumours, but didn’t precisely locate these definitions within a tumour environment. A new study has characterised the cellular makeup in situ, painting a clear picture of the spatial layout and dynamics. Researchers analysed samples from adjacent non-cancerous tissue (top left), the edge of a tumour (centre), and within the tumour itself (right). They grouped the cells into clusters with common characteristics (bottom row, each unique cluster shown with a different colour). This created a map of a tumour’s diversity and revealed key information about the mechanisms of tumour development, and could improve personalised cancer treatments.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

Website

• Image from work by Rui Wu, Wenbo Guo & Xinyao Qiu, and colleagues
• The International Cooperation Laboratory on Signal Transduction, Eastern Hepatobiliary Surgery Hospital, Shanghai, China
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
• Published in Science Advances, December 2021