Pan-Cancer Drivers Are Recurrent Transcriptional Regulatory Heterogeneities in Early-Stage Luminal Breast Cancer

Abstract

The heterogeneous composition of solid tumors is known to impact disease progression and response to therapy. Malignant cells coexist in different regulatory states that can be accessed transcrip-tomically by single-cell RNA sequencing, but these methods have many caveats related to sensitivity, noise, and sample handling. We revised a statistical fluctuation analysis called stochastic profiling to combine with 10-cell RNA sequencing, which was designed for laser-capture microdissection (LCM) and extended here for immuno-LCM. When applied to a cohort of late-onset, early-stage luminal breast cancers, the integrated approach identified thousands of candidate regulatory heterogeneities. Intersecting the candidates from different tumors yielded a relatively stable set of 710 recurrent heterogeneously expressed genes (RHEG), which were significantly variable in >50% of patients. RHEGs were not strongly confounded by dissociation artifacts, cell-cycle oscillations, or driving mutations for breast cancer. Rather, RHEGs were enriched for epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition genes and, unexpectedly, the latest pan-cancer assembly of driver genes across cancer types other than breast. These findings indicate that heterogeneous transcriptional regulation conceivably provides a faster, reversible mechanism for malignant cells to evaluate the effects of potential oncogenes or tumor suppressors on cancer hallmarks. Significance Profiling intratumor heterogeneity of luminal breast carcinoma cells identifies a recurrent set of genes, suggesting sporadic activation of pathways known to drive other types of cancer.