Effective cancer treatment has been precluded by the presence of various forms of intratumoral complexity that drive treatment resistance and metastasis. Recent single-cell sequencing technologies are significantly facilitating the characterization of tumor internal architecture during disease progression. New applications and advances occurring at a fast pace predict an imminent broad application of these technologies in many research areas. As occurred with next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies, once applied to clinical samples across tumor types, single-cell sequencing technologies could trigger an exponential increase in knowledge of the molecular pathways involved in cancer progression and contribute to the improvement of cancer treatment.
Keywords: cancer functional heterogeneity; intratumor heterogeneity; liquid biopsy; single-cell sequencing; tumor microenvironment.
Copyright © 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.