Intratumor Heterogeneity: Evolution through Space and Time

Recent technologic advances have permitted higher resolution and more rapid analysis of individual cancer genomes at the single-nucleotide level. Such advances have shown bewildering intertumor heterogeneity with limited somatic alterations shared between tumors of the same histopathologic subtype. Exacerbating such complexity, increasing evidence of intratumor genetic heterogeneity (ITH) is emerging, both within individual tumor biopsies and spatially separated between biopsies of the same tumor. Sequential analysis of tumors has also revealed evidence that ITH temporally evolves during the disease course. ITH has implications for predictive or prognostic biomarker strategies, where the tumor subclone that…