Phenotypic Plasticity of Fibroblasts during Mammary Carcinoma Development

Cancer-associated fibroblasts populations change over time during mammary carcinoma tumor development

The role of cancer-associated fibroblasts in mammary carcinoma development

Cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) in the tumor microenvironment contribute to all stages of tumorigenesis and are usually considered to be tumor-promoting cells. In this project we found a remarkable degree of CAF herterogenity which changed during mammary cancer development. We created whole transcriptome longitudinal data on CAF development from early- and late-stage tumors and observed a shift in fibroblast populations over time, which was negatively associated with patient survival. We then trained a random forest classification model to compute a gene signature that had predicive power in bulk tumor patient samples.

The full manuscript can be found at International Journal of Molecular Sciences.