Intratumoral heterogeneity of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma

The advent of large scale genome characterization led to rapidly increasing knowledge of genetic landscapes of malignancies in recent years. Besides a difference in quantity of mutations between different entities, studies revealed as well a difference in the amount of mutations in varying locations of a single neoplastic lesion: the relation of private (only present in a single sample of a tumor) and common mutations (present in all tested samples of tumor) can vary markedly (1-3).