Tumor Heterogeneity: Ignorance Is Not Bliss
Menée à partir de l'analyse d'échantillons tumoraux issus de 41 patients atteints d'un adénocarcinome
Tumor heterogeneity encompasses interpatient heterogeneity, intrapatient heterogeneity among disease sites within a patient, and intratumoral heterogeneity within a single disease site. While tumor profiling provides a glimpse of interpatient heterogeneity, oncologists lack adequate tools in our diagnostic tool kit to fully characterize intrapatient and intratumoral heterogeneity, which remain critical barriers to developing targeted anticancer therapies, particularly in gastroesophageal adenocarcinoma (GEA). Although distal gastric cancer, historically associated with Helicobacter pylori, is becoming less common, proximal cancers arising near the gastroesophageal junction are becoming more common in Western countries owing to their associations with obesity and the Western diet. These cancers have extensive chromosomal instability leading to copy number alterations, including amplifications of genes encoding potentially actionable receptor tyrosine kinases, such as ERBB2 (OMIM 164870), EGFR (OMIM 131550), MET (OMIM 164860), and FGFR2 (OMIM 176943).
JAMA Network Open , commentaire en libre accès, 2019