Cancer-cell intrinsic gene expression signatures minimise the confounding effects of intratumoural heterogeneity in colorectal cancer patient classification.

Stromal-derived intratumoural heterogeneity (ITH) has been shown to undermine molecular stratification of patients into appropriate prognostic/predictive subgroups. Using several clinically relevant colorectal cancer (CRC) gene expression signatures, we assessed the susceptibility of these signatures to the confounding effects of ITH using gene expression microarray data obtained from multiple tumour regions of a cohort of 24 patients, including central tumour, the tumour invasive front and lymph node metastasis. Transcriptional profiles generated from matched central tumour, invasive front and lymph node regions from 24 colorectal cancer patients.