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Updated: May 23, 2026
Heterogeneity Mapping of Protein Expression in Tumors using Quantitative Immunofluorescence
Published on: October 25, 2011
Intratumor heterogeneity: seeing the wood for the trees
Timothy A Yap1, Marco Gerlinger, P Andrew Futreal
1Department of Medicine, Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, Sutton, Surrey, UK.
None:
Most advanced solid tumors remain incurable, with resistance to chemotherapeutics and targeted therapies a common cause of poor clinical outcome. Intratumor heterogeneity may contribute to this failure by initiating phenotypic diversity enabling drug resistance to emerge and by introducing tumor sampling bias. Envisaging tumor growth as a Darwinian tree with the trunk representing ubiquitous mutations and the branches representing heterogeneous mutations may help in drug discovery and the development of predictive biomarkers of drug response.
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