DEPTH2: an mRNA-based algorithm to evaluate intratumor heterogeneity without reference to normal controls

BACKGROUND: Intratumor heterogeneity (ITH) is associated with tumor progression, unfavorable prognosis, immunosuppression, genomic instability, and therapeutic resistance. Thus, evaluation of ITH levels is valuable in cancer diagnosis and treatment. METHODS: We proposed a new mRNA-based ITH evaluation algorithm (DEPTH2) without reference to normal controls. DEPTH2 evaluates ITH levels based on the standard deviations of absolute z-scored transcriptome levels in tumors, reflecting the asynchronous level of transcriptome alterations relative to the central tendency in a tumor. RESULTS: By analyzing 33 TCGA cancer types, we demonstrated that DEPTH2 ITH was effective in measuring ITH for its significant associations with tumor progression, unfavorable prognosis, genomic instability, reduced antitumor immunity and immunotherapy response, and altered drug response in diverse cancers. Compared to other five ITH evaluation algorithms (MATH, PhyloWGS, ABSOLUTE, DEPTH, and tITH), DEPTH2 ITH showed a stronger association with unfavorable clinical outcomes, and in characterizing other properties of ITH, such as its associations with genomic instability and antitumor immunosuppression, DEPTH2 also displayed competitive performance. CONCLUSIONS: DEPTH2 is expected to have a wider spectrum of applications in evaluating ITH in comparison to other algorithms. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12967-022-03355-1.