CRIS, a superior predictive and prognostic classification system of colorectal cancer based on high-resolution analysis of cancer cell-autonomous traits

Recent work built on published transcriptional subtypes of colorectal cancer (CRC) has shown that tumor stromal content impacts CRC classification, with both clinical and biological implications. To Tackle the issue of intrinsic epithelial gene profiles, we assembled a dataset of matched liver metastatic colorectal cancer and Patients Derived Xenografts. in which the stroma of the original tumor is substituted by murine tissue, we deployed a molecularly annotated collection of 515 PDXs from 244 patients as a resource for species (human)-specific assessment of cancer-cell intrinsic transcriptional features. We identified five ColoRectal cancer Intrinsic Subtypes (CRIS) endowed with functional and phenotypic characteristics related to specific genetic traits, most of which were not evidenced in the transcriptional subgroups reported in previous studies. Expression profiling of frozen liver metastasis samples