Tracking clonal evolution during treatment in ovarian cancer using cell-free DNA
Menée à l'aide d'échantillons sanguins et d'échantillons tumoraux prélevés sur des patientes atteintes d'un cancer séreux ovarien de haut grade et menée à partir d'une approche utilisant l'ADN libre circulant, cette étude démontre que la résistance thérapeutique résulte généralement de l'expansion sélective d'un seul clone ou d'un petit sous-ensemble de clones cellulaires présents au moment du diagnostic
Emergence of drug resistance is the main cause of therapeutic failure in patients with high-grade serous ovarian cancer (HGSOC)1. To study drug resistance in patients, we developed CloneSeq-SV, which combines single-cell whole-genome sequencing2 with targeted deep sequencing of clone-specific genomic structural variants in time-series cell-free DNA. CloneSeq-SV exploits tumour clone-specific structural variants as highly sensitive endogenous cell-free DNA markers, enabling the relative abundance measurements and evolutionary analysis of co-existing clonal populations over the therapeutic time course. Here, using this approach, we studied 18 patients with HGSOC over a multi-year period from diagnosis to recurrence and showed that drug resistance typically arose from selective expansion of a single or small subset of clones present at diagnosis. Drug-resistant clones frequently showed interpretable and distinctive genomic features, including chromothripsis, whole-genome doubling, and high-level amplifications of oncogenes such as CCNE1, RAB25, MYC and NOTCH3. Phenotypic analysis of matched single-cell RNA sequencing data3 indicated pre-existing and clone-specific transcriptional states such as upregulation of epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition and VEGF pathways, linked to drug resistance. In one notable case, clone-specific ERBB2 amplification affected the efficacy of a secondary targeted therapy with a positive patient outcome. Together, our findings indicate that drug-resistant states in HGSOC pre-exist at diagnosis, leading to positive selection and reduced clonal complexity at relapse. We suggest these findings motivate investigation of evolution-informed adaptive treatment regimens to ablate drug resistance in future HGSOC studies.
Nature , article en libre accès, 2025