Landau Lab develops a new tool that quantifies cancer’s plasticity
How Do Tumor Cells "Shape-Shift" to Drive Cancer Aggression?
The Landau Lab and the New York Genome Center have developed a powerful tool, called PATH (Phylogenetic Analysis of Trait Heritability), to measure how tumor cells “shape-shift” or change states, a process known as plasticity, which drives treatment resistance and cancer spread. Described Sept. 24 in a paper in Nature Genetics, PATH quantifies cell plasticity by tracking lineage information and cell states, offering unprecedented insights into tumor evolution. In glioblastoma and pancreatic cancer models, PATH uncovered key transitional states enabling metastasis, while in leukemia, it linked DNA mutations to plastic, stem-like cell states. The tool’s ability to clarify these dynamics may lead to better prognostic tests and targeted treatments that reduce tumor plasticity, improving cancer outcomes.
The new tool can be used to quantify this plasticity in samples of tumor cells. The researchers demonstrated it with analyses of tumor samples from animal models and human patients, identifying, for example, a key transitional cell state in glioblastoma, the most common form of brain cancer.
“Plasticity is a tremendous enabler of cancer spread and treatment resistance, and we expect this new tool to give us critical insights into those processes – insights we hope to use to fight cancers more effectively,.
Dr. Dan Landau, professor of medicine in the division of hematology and medical oncology at Weill Cornell Medicine, and a core faculty member of the New York Genome Center
