Dr. Nikolaus Schultz co authored the paper, “Genomic characterization of metastatic patterns from prospective clinical sequencing of 25,000 patients“, along with Nguyen et al. in the journal Cell. In it, they assembled MSK-MET, a pan-cancer cohort of over 25,000 patients with metastatic diseases. By analyzing genomic and clinical data from this cohort, they identified associations between genomic alterations and patterns of metastatic dissemination across 50 tumor types. They found that chromosomal instability is strongly correlated with metastatic burden in some tumor types, including prostate adenocarcinoma, lung adenocarcinoma, and HR+/HER2+ breast ductal carcinoma, but not in others, including colorectal cancer and high-grade serous ovarian cancer, where copy-number alteration patterns may be established early in tumor development. They also identified somatic alterations associated with metastatic burden and specific target organs. The data offers a valuable resource for the investigation of the biological basis for metastatic spread and highlight the complex role of chromosomal instability in cancer progression.
You can read the paper in Cell here.