The cells in a tumour are not all the same. They keep evolving as the cancer advances, and this mix of different cell populations helps explain why targeted therapies fail and drugs stop working.
A team from the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine and Wharton School built Canopy to reconstruct a tumour’s evolutionary history. It uses two types of mutations, somatic copy number alterations and single-nucleotide alterations, measured in several samples taken from the same patient at different places and times. The team tested it on leukemia and ovarian cancer samples and on a human breast cancer cell line, and published the work in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Canopy is open source. The aim is to help oncologists find biomarkers for cell populations linked to drug resistance and invasive spread.
via New software helps to identify course of cancer metastasis, tumor ‘evolution’ | ScienceDaily