Single-Cell Analyses Reveal Mechanisms of Cancer Stem Cell Maintenance and Epithelial–Mesenchymal Transition in Recurrent Bladder Cancer

Abstract

Purpose: Bladder cancer treatment remains a major clinical challenge due to therapy resistance and a high recurrence rate. Profiling intratumor heterogeneity can reveal the molecular mechanism of bladder cancer recurrence.

Experimental design: Here, we performed single-cell RNA sequencing and Assay for Transposase-Accessible Chromatin using sequencing (ATAC-seq) on tumors from 13 patients with low recurrence risk, high recurrence risk, and recurrent bladder cancer.

Results: Our study generated a comprehensive cancer-cell atlas consisting of 54,971 single cells and identified distinct cell subpopulations. We found that the cancer stem-cell subpopulation is enriched during bladder cancer recurrence with elevated expression of EZH2. We further defined a subpopulation-specific molecular mechanism whereby EZH2 maintains H3K27me3-mediated repression of the NCAM1 gene, thereby inactivating the cell invasive and stemness transcriptional program. Furthermore, taking advantage of this large single-cell dataset, we elucidated the spectrum of epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) in clinical samples and revealed distinct EMT features associated with bladder cancer subtypes. We identified that TCF7 promotes EMT in corroboration with single-cell ATAC with high-throughput sequencing (scATAC-seq) analysis. Additionally, we constructed regulatory networks specific to recurrent bladder cancer.

Conclusions: Our study and analytic approaches herein provide a rich resource for the further study of cancer stem cells and EMT in the bladder cancer research field.