Where do tumor cells grow?

This image illustrates a recent discovery by the team led by Donate Weghorn at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), in collaboration with the University of Cologne: that cancer grows uniformly across the entire tumor mass.

Until now, it was believed that tumors grew primarily at their outer edges, with the cells in the interior being much less active. However, by studying tissue from early stages of liver cancer, it has been found that they grow uniformly. The technique used is spatial genomics, which can analyze the genetic information of cells in specific locations within a tissue. This revealed that all tumor regions develop uniformly and are equally active, with the potential to harbor aggressive mutations.

Knowing the position of the cells, the research team created a map to locate the mutations in each sample and measure the direction and spread of these mutations. They discovered that the angles between the position of the original cell and its descendant cells extended in all directions, not just outward. To validate these results, they performed computational models and confirmed that the mutation patterns matched those in the liver tissue samples. This is shown in the image: cells with the same type of mutation may cluster in a specific area of the tumor (blue) or be distributed across different parts of the tumor (red).

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