Genomic architecture of radioresistant prostate cancer

26 Background: Spatial intra-tumoral heterogeneity of prostate cancer is secondary to genomic diversity and multi-clonality. These unique features potentially promote resistance to treatment. Here, we investigated if clonal selection or adaptation of new clones dominates in prostate cancer at the time of recurrence following radiotherapy. Methods: We identified 11 patients with biopsy-proven multifocal recurrent prostate cancer following radiotherapy. Copy number aberration (CNA) profiling was performed on 33 anatomically distinct tumor foci with 11 matched-normals. 4 cases had matched pre-radiotherapy tumors for CNA profiling to assess for clonality. We evaluated for recurrent gene amplifications and deletions, and determined genomic instability by percent genome aberration (PGA). We also compared these genomic indices against 373 sporadic prostate cancers from the Canadian Prostate Cancer Gene Network. Results: We observed large intra- and inter-patient variation (p