Carbon dating cancer: defining the chronology of metastatic progression in colorectal cancer

BACKGROUND: Patients often ask oncologists how long a cancer has been present before causing symptoms or spreading to other organs. The evolutionary trajectory of cancers can be defined using phylogenetic approaches but lack of chronological references makes dating the exact onset of tumours very challenging. PATIENTS AND METHODS: Here we describe the case of a colorectal cancer patient presenting with synchronous lung metastasis and metachronous thyroid, chest wall and urinary tract metastases over the course of five years. The chest wall metastasis was caused by needle tract seeding, implying a known time of onset. Using whole genome sequencing data from primary and metastatic sites we inferred the complete chronology of the cancer by exploiting the time of needle tract seeding as an in vivo 'stopwatch'. This approach allowed us to follow the progression of the disease back in time, dating each ancestral node of the phylogenetic tree in the past history of the tumour. We used a Bayesian phylogenomic approach, which accounts for possible dynamic changes in mutational rate, to reconstruct the phylogenetic tree and effectively "carbon date" the malignant progression. RESULTS: The primary colon cancer emerged between five and eight years prior to the clinical diagnosis. The primary tumour metastasised to the lung and the thyroid within a year from its onset. The thyroid lesion presented as a tumour-to-tumour deposit within a benign Hurthle adenoma. Despite rapid metastatic progression from the primary tumour, the patient showed an indolent disease course. Primary cancer and metastases were microsatellite stable and displayed low chromosomal instability. Neo-antigen analysis suggested minimal immunogenicity. CONCLUSION: Our data provide the first in vivo experimental evidence documenting the timing of metastatic progression in colorectal cancer and suggest that genomic instability might be more important than the metastatic potential of the primary cancer in dictating colorectal cancer fate.