Researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center built a new atlas of lung cells, uncovering new cellular pathways and precursors in the development of lung adenocarcinoma, the most common type of lung cancer. These findings, published today in Nature, open the door for development of new strategies to detect or intercept the disease in its earliest stages.
Led by Humam Kadara, Ph.D., professor of Translational Molecular Pathology and Linghua Wang, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of Genomic Medicine, the team generated an atlas of around 250,000 normal and cancerous epithelial cells that line the lungs by studying genetic changes in each of these cells individually using a technology called single-cell sequencing.
Among the key findings of this multidisciplinary effort was the discovery and validation of a transitional alveolar cell state that harbors KRAS mutations, even in normal lung cells, and ultimately transitions to lung adenocarcinoma.
This work was funded by Johnson & Johnson, the National Cancer Institute (NCI), NCI Cancer Systems Biology Consortium, NCI Human Tumor Atlas Network, and the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT).
For more information 👉 Study unravels the earliest cellular genesis of lung adenocarcinoma | MD Anderson Cancer Center
