Epigenetic Heritability of Cell Plasticity Drives Cancer Drug Resistance through a One-to-Many Genotype-to-Phenotype Paradigm

Abstract

Cancer drug resistance is multi-factorial, driven by heritable (epi)genetic changes but also phenotypic plasticity. Here, we dissected drivers of resistance by perturbing colorectal cancer patient-derived organoids longitudinally with drugs in sequence. Combined longitudinal lineage tracking, single cell multi-omics analysis, evolutionary modelling, and machine learning revealed that different targeted drugs select for distinct subclones, supporting rationally designed drug sequences. The cellular memory of drug resistance was encoded as a heritable epigenetic configuration from which multiple transcriptional programs could run, supporting a one-to-many (epi)genotype-to-phenotype map that explains how clonal expansions and plasticity manifest together. This epigenetic landscape may ensure drug resistant subclones can exhibit distinct phenotypes in changing environments while still preserving the cellular memory encoding for their selective advantage. Chemotherapy resistance was instead entirely driven by transient phenotypic plasticity rather than stable clonal selection. Inducing further chromosomal instability before drug application changed clonal evolution but not convergent transcriptional programs. Collectively, these data show how genetic and epigenetic alterations are selected to engender a "permissive epigenome” that enables phenotypic plasticity.