The amount of mRNA expressed by a tumor seems to serve as a reliable indicator of disease progression, a new analysis of human tissue sample finds. The correlation, which researchers identified for 15 types of cancer, was enabled by a new statistical technique that helps make sense of massive sets of convoluted data.
Unlike research conducted on the homogenous tumors that cancer scientists can grow in a lab and use as experimental models, studying cancers that grow in humans can be a messy affair. Cancer cells, microbiota, and human immune cells can all exist in close proximity to one another, and researchers attempting to sequence the tumor cells typically choose between bulk sequencing, which yields difficult-to-interpret data, or single-cell sequencing, which quickly becomes costly in terms of both time and money. The new technique, however, can pull useful information out of bulk data generated from human cancer samples and provide ...
