Evidence of drug-response heterogeneity rapidly generated from a single cancer cell

// Rong Wang 1, * , Chengmeng Jin 1, * and Xun Hu 1 1 Cancer Institute, A Key Laboratory For Cancer Prevention & Intervention, Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China, The Second Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Hangzhou, China * These authors have contributed equally to this work Correspondence to: Xun Hu, email: huxun@zju.edu.cn Keywords: heterogeneity, cancer, drug-response Received: November 04, 2016     Accepted: March 07, 2017     Published: April 12, 2017 ABSTRACT One cancer cell line is believed to be composed of numerous clones with different drug sensitivity. We sought to investigate the difference of drug-response pattern in clones from a cell line or from a single cell. We showed that 22 clones derived from 4T1 cells were drastically different from each other with respect to drug-response pattern against 11 anticancer drugs and expression profile of 19 genes associated with drug resistance or sensitivity. Similar results were obtained using daughter clones derived from a single 4T1 cell. Each daughter clone showed distinct drug-response pattern and gene expression profile. Similar results were also obtained using Bcap37 cells. We conclude that a single cancer cell can rapidly produce a population of cells with high heterogeneity of drug response and the acquisition of drug-response heterogeneity is random.