The tissue differentiation and cancer manifolds in gene and protein expression spaces

Abstract

AbstractIt is well known that, for a particular tissue, the homeostatic and cancer attractors are well apart both in gene expression and in protein expression spaces. By using data for 15 tissues and the corresponding tumors from The Cancer Genome Atlas, and for 49 normal tissues and 20 tumors from The Human Protein Atlas, we show that the set of normal attractors are also well separated from the set of tumors. Roughly speaking, one may say that there is a cancer progression axis orthogonal to the normal tissue differentiation and cancer manifolds. This separation suggests that therapies targeting common genes, which define the cancer axis, may be effective, irrespective of the tissue of origin.