Single cell RNA-seq study of primary glioblastoma featured in the Boston Globe

Anoop Patel, Mario Suvà, Shawn Gillespie with Itay Tirosh from the Regev lab and co-authors have described in new detail tumor heterogeneity in primary glioblastoma. The study, published this week in Science, shows the diverse set of transcriptional profiles that are present in primary tumors.

The Boston Globe featured the study and brings it to a point:

“This may be to my knowledge the first study that tried to do this carefully within individual cells from human tumors and it is a bummer, because this is why cancer is so hard to cure,” said Sean Morrison, director of the Children’s Medical Center Research Institute at the University of Texas Southwestern. “It’s a different battle in every patient in some ways. And this heterogeneity is why the best ideas we often have will kill 90 percent of the cells and leave the other 10 percent behind.”

Read the full paper here:
Anoop P. Patel, Itay Tirosh, John J. Trombetta, Alex K. Shalek, Shawn M. Gillespie, Hiroaki Wakimoto, Daniel P. Cahill, Brian V. Nahed, William T. Curry, Robert L. Martuza, David N. Louis, Orit Rozenblatt-Rosen, Mario L. Suvà, Aviv Regev, and Bradley E. Bernstein. (2014). Single-cell RNA-seq highlights intratumoral heterogeneity in primary glioblastoma. Science . doi:10.1126/science.1254257