Back

Genomic hallmarks of cellular dormancy in cancer and therapeutic implications

Wiecek, A. J.; Cutty, S. J.; Kornai, D.; Parreno-Centeno, M.; Gourmet, L. E.; Malagoli Tagliazucchi, G.; Jacobson, D. H.; Zhang, P.; Xiong, L.; Bond, G. L.; Barr, A. R.; Secrier, M.

2021-12-03 cancer biology
10.1101/2021.11.12.468410 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Therapy resistance in cancer is often driven by a subpopulation of cells that are temporarily arrested in a non-proliferative G0 state, which is difficult to capture and whose mutational drivers remain largely unknown. We developed methodology to robustly identify this state from transcriptomic signals and characterised its prevalence and genomic constraints in solid primary tumours. We show that G0 arrest preferentially emerges in the context of more stable, less mutated genomes which maintain TP53 integrity and lack the hallmarks of DNA damage repair deficiency, while presenting increased APOBEC mutagenesis. We employ machine learning to uncover novel genomic dependencies of this process and validate the role of the centrosomal gene CEP89 as a modulator of proliferation/G0 arrest capacity. Lastly, we demonstrate that G0 arrest underlies unfavourable responses to various therapies exploiting cell cycle, kinase signalling and epigenetic mechanisms in single cell data, and propose a G0 arrest transcriptional signature that is linked with therapeutic resistance and can be used to further study and clinically track this state.

Matching journals

The top 3 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.