Roni Haas, Rong Rong Huang, Adam B Weiner, Yash Patel, Lydia Y Liu, Takafumi N Yamaguchi, Raag Agrawal, Paul C Boutros, Robert E Reiter
Multifocal prostate cancer is a prevalent phenomenon, with most cases remaining uncharacterized from a genomic perspective. A patient presented with bilateral prostate cancer. On systematic biopsy, two indistinguishable clinicopathologic lesions were detected. Whole-genome sequencing displayed somatically unrelated tumors with distinct driver CNA regions, suggesting independent origins of the two tumors. We demonstrated that similar clinicopathologic multifocal tumors, which might be interpreted as clonal disease, can in fact represent independent cancers. Genetic prognostics can prevent mischaracterization of multifocal disease to enable optimal patient management.