Dr Sam Behjati, Wellcome Intermediate Clinical Fellow from the Department of Paediatrics and the Sanger Institute, and colleagues from across the Clinical School reported in Science the precise cellular identity of kidney cancer cells.

The team used single cell RNA sequencing technologies, studying just over 70,000 cells derived from tumours and normal kidney tissues representing developing, paediatric and adult kidneys.

Their approach was to compare kidney cancer cells (paediatric Wilms’ and adult renal cell carcinoma) against a reference map of normal kidney cells from across the life span to identify which normal kidney cells the tumour cells resembled most. This experiment provides a blueprint for systematically investigating the cellular identity of kidney cancer and an approach that can be applied to other cancers.