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Circulating Tumor Cell Heterogeneity in Neuroendocrine Prostate Cancer by Single Cell Copy Number Analysis

Neuroendocrine prostate cancer (NEPC) is an aggressive variant of prostate cancer that may arise de novo or develop from pre-existing prostate adenocarcinoma as a mechanism of treatment resistance. Combined loss of tumor suppressors RB1, TP53, PTEN are frequent in NEPC but also present in a subset of prostate adenocarcinomas. Most clinical and preclinical studies support a trans-differentiation process, whereby NEPC arises clonally from a prostate adenocarcinoma precursor during the course of treatment resistance. Here we highlight a case of NEPC with significant intra-patient heterogeneity observed across metastases. We further demonstrate how single-cell genomic analysis of circulating tumor cells combined with phenotypic evaluation of cellular diversity can be considered as a window into tumor heterogeneity in patients with advanced prostate cancer.

We performed whole genome sequencing of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from patients with castration resistant adenocarcinoma (n=4) and neuroendocrine prostate cancer (n=8). CTCs were collected via Epic Sciences platform and single CTC genomic data (n=215) generated via Illumina NextSeq500.