Decoupling epithelial-mesenchymal transitions from stromal profiles by integrative expression analysis

Epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) is the most commonly cited mechanism for cancer metastasis, but it is difficult to distinguish from profiles of normal stromal cells in the tumour microenvironment. In this study we use published single cell RNA-seq data to directly compare mesenchymal signatures from cancer and stromal cells. Informed by these comparisons, we developed a computational framework to decouple these two sources of mesenchymal expression profiles using bulk RNA-seq datasets. This deconvolution offers the opportunity to characterise EMT across hundreds of tumours and examine its association with metastasis and other clinical features. With this approach, we find three distinct patterns of EMT, associated with squamous, gynaecological and gastrointestinal cancer types. Surprisingly, in most cancer types, EMT patterns are not associated with increased chance of metastasis, suggesting that other steps in the metastatic cascade may represent the main bottleneck. This work provides a comprehensive evaluation of EMT profiles and their functional significance across hundreds of tumours while circumventing the confounding effect of stromal cells.