In the literature: October 2019

Gastrointestinal cancers are a subset of molecularly heterogeneous diseases. In the era of personalised medicine, major efforts are being made towards stratifying patients according to molecular profiling. However, although most treatments are currently based on targeted therapy in relation to specific genomic alterations, acquired resistance emerges during anticancer therapies and subsequently treatment failure occurs. Intratumour heterogeneity plays a significant role in the acquisition of resistance by clonal evolution of tumour cell populations under therapeutic pressure. Despite a single tumour biopsy represents the standard for cancer research and drives our therapeutic decisions, lim…