Quantifying epigenetic reprogramming and cellular plasticity in preneoplastic lesions reveals dedifferentiation as a key precancer hallmark

Teschendorff and Tham developed PLASTIC, a pan-tissue computational framework that quantifies cellular plasticity and epigenetic reprogramming from single-cell RNA-seq data. Applied to pan-preneoplastic tissues, it shows that epigenetic reprogramming levels in precancerous cells correlate with cellular plasticity and cancer risk, and that high-risk states exhibit stronger dedifferentiation even compared with their fetal cell counterparts.