Intra-tumor heterogeneity and clonal evolution of papillary renal cell carcinoma

Limited knowledge of intratumor heterogeneity (ITH), and clonal evolution of papillary renal cell carcinoma (pRCC) and rare kidney tumor subtypes hinders understanding of tumorigenesis and therapeutic efficacy. We conducted an integrative genomic and epigenomic ITH analysis and studied clonal evolutionary history of pRCC and rare kidney tumor subtypes. We dissected multiple consecutive samples from the center of the tumor towards the tumor's periphery, a normal sample ~5 cm distant from the tumor, and, where feasible, metastatic regions in the adrenal gland. Specifically, we performed 60X multi-region whole-genome sequencing (mWGS), both genome-wide methylation and SNP array profiling, and deep targeted sequencing (average 500X coverage) of 254 cancer driver genes ( PMID:24390350). The study population comprises 39 patients with kidney cancers, including 23 with papillary type 1 (pRCC1), 12 with papillary type 2 (pRCC2), one of which also had areas of... (for more see dbGaP study page.)