
Cancer cell lines evolve in ways that affect how they respond to drugs - dsr12
https://www.broadinstitute.org/news/cancer-cell-lines-evolve-ways-affect-how-they-respond-drugs
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nonbel
>"Long thought to be genetically stable and identical, cancer cell lines
harbor significant levels of genetic variation, which may help explain why it
can be hard to reproduce findings in cell line-based research."

Who thought this?

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caraffle
When people say "cell line" they mean a proliferation of a specific subclonal
population in the lab.

Cancer cells in vivo are known to have clonal evolution [1]. This paper is
specifically talking about in vitro growth on a petri dish. The problem is
when a biopsy is taken it includes some cancer cells and some normal tissue.
The cancer cells need to be isolated, then multiplied to have enough material
to work with. This paper suggests this process results in heterogenous progeny
- differing in key mutations related to immunotherapy.

(disclaimer: not anywhere near an expert, software guy in bioinformatics)

[1]
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3367003/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3367003/)

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nonbel
Yes, it is well known there are a certain number of mutations (indels, point
mutations, chromosomal rearrangements, etc) per division and cells in a dish
divide many, many times.

Why would anyone think they would not harbour significant levels of genetic
variation? This makes it sound like they just spent 40 years misinterpreting
data because they didnt do some basic algebra.

