Nair Varela has successfully defended her PhD thesis entitled “Genomic heterogeneity of circulating tumor cells“. In this thesis, Nair I developed a bioinformatic pipeline to compare genomic differences across bulk tumors, metastases, circulating tumor cell (CTC) clusters, and single CTCs in a mouse xenograft model, accounting for technical artifacts and contamination. Her study revealed significant genomic heterogeneity between cell line passages but few de novo mutations during xenograft growth, with differences largely driven by pre-existing variations. Single CTCs and CTC clusters displayed unique, recurrent mutations—many in genes linked to tumor dissemination and survival—though the high number of such genes raises questions about their biological relevance, warranting further investigation.
