Dynamic Landscape of Oral Carcinogenesis Reveals Multistage Malignant Transcriptional Programs



Abstract

Understanding composition changes among tumor initiation and progression is critical to characterize the tumor microenvironment of oral cancer. Here, we profiled 205,000 single-cell transcriptomes and 58,800 single-cell epi-genomes of 25 oral cancer samples derived from three different sites: adjacent normal, pre-cancerous lesions, and tumor. The malignant epithelial cells exhibited distinct expression programs, and cells that enriched with cell-cycle program are prevalent in tumor samples and associated with worse survival.