Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 13, 2026

Advanced Animal Model of Colorectal Metastasis in Liver: Imaging Techniques and Properties of Metastatic Clones
Published on: November 30, 2016
Clonality of combined tumors
Jiaoti Huang1, Carmen Behrens, Ignacio I Wistuba
1Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, University of Rochester Medical Center, Rochester, NY, USA.
Context:
Tumors with mixed morphologic patterns (combined tumors) are sometimes encountered, and questions often arise regarding the mechanism of molecular pathogenesis of each component and their relationships.
Objective:
To determine whether different components of combined tumors contain the same or different genetic alterations, thus providing evidence for their clonality.
Materials And Methods:
Six combined tumors with 2 components (in each case, both components showed epithelial differentiation morphologically) were studied by microdissecting tumor cells from each morphologic area followed by loss of heterozygosity analysis.
Results:
In 1 of the cases studied, the different morphologic areas contained different patterns of genetic alterations. In the remaining 5 cases, the different morphologic areas harbored identical genetic changes in the chromosome regions studied. The latter group, interestingly, included a colonic tumor with an area of tubulovillous adenoma and an area of neuroendocrine carcinoma, and 2 lung tumors with squamous carcinoma and small cell carcinoma components.
Conclusions:
Our results suggest that in the majority of combined tumors, cells with different phenotypes share similar genotype and may arise from a single precursor cell. However, in a minority of these tumors, different areas may be derived from different precursor cells.
Related Concept Videos
Cancer Stem Cells and Tumor Maintenance
Cancer stem cells are thought to originate from tissue-specific normal stem cells or progenitor cells. The normal stem cells usually reside in...
Combination Therapies and Personalized Medicine
The combination of the drug acetazolamide and sulforaphane is a good example of combination therapy to treat cancer. The cells in the interior of a large tumor often die due to the hypoxic and...
T Cell Activation and Clonal Selection
Naive T cells that have not yet encountered an antigen express two primary CD...
Tumor Immunotherapy

