Fig. 8: Cellular relationship and disease progression model of NEPC.
From: Single-cell analysis supports a luminal-neuroendocrine transdifferentiation in human prostate cancer
Schematic illustration of tumor evolution toward the neuroendocrine phenotype, in which dotted arrows indicate the potential relationship between cell lineages and the solid arrows indicate that NEPC is directly originated from AR-dependent tumor cells. In this model, we suppose that the NE precursor, AR-independent tumor cell, directly transdifferentiates from the luminal-like tumor cell, and that is the precursor, which will next evolve in forming the focal NEPC and finally progress to small-cell (pure) NEPC. The extent of AR and NE signature scores varies over the spectrum of adenocarcinoma to neuroendocrine transdifferentiation (orange indicates a high level of AR signal and green indicates a high level of NE signal).
