The origins of seven types of kidney cancer, including several rare subtypes, have been identified by researchers at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. The study, published today in Nature Communications, used computational methods to analyze existing datasets and pinpoint the cellular signals given off by different cancers as they emerge.
Previous studies have used these techniques to compare normal and diseased tissue in some of the most common kidney cancers, but to conduct single-cell sequencing on many hundreds of tumors would not be achievable. In this study, the researchers turned to computational techniques to mine Human Cell Atlas reference data and databases of tumor gene expression. They assessed mRNA signals in 1,300 childhood and adult renal tumors, spanning seven different tumor types, in order to investigate the origins of these cancers.
The results confirmed that these childhood cancers are developmental in origin, occurring after errors in a particular developmental cell type's journey to maturity. In contrast, adult kidney cancers emerged from mature cell types and do not revert to a developmental pattern of gene expression in the vast majority of cases. Each cancer type was also found to exhibit unique cellular signals, or patterns of gene expression, that could be used to classify them in future.
First author Matthew Young said, "It has long been assumed that childhood tumors have 'fetal' origins. Now we can replace that loose definition with a precise, quantitative measurement of the cellular signals that different tumor types exhibit. Our analysis also refutes the theory that adult tumors revert to a developmental state, unless they are a highly lethal subtype of adult kidney cancer."