Abstract
An international team of scientists, spearheaded by a £20 million ($25.9 million) award from Cancer Research UK, has developed the most detailed maps of breast cancer available, which maps breast tumor samples to a resolution smaller than a single cell.
The maps, published in Nature Cancer, detail the intricacies and complexity of the cancer landscape—comprising cancer cells, immune cells, and connective tissue—and how it varies both between, and within, tumors depending on their unique genetic makeup.
In the future, the hope is that such a map could provide clinicians with a wealth of information specific to each patient's tumor at the time of diagnosis, thus providing an opportunity to match patients with the most appropriate therapy. The information would also be used to analyze a tumor during a patient's treatment to more clearly see how a patient is responding to therapy and to adjust the treatment regimen based on this.