{"entity":{"id":"differentiation","kind":"term","name":"Differentiation","aka":["differentiated","well-differentiated","poorly differentiated","poorly-differentiated","undifferentiated","dedifferentiation","dedifferentiated","de-differentiation","lineage","lineage plasticity","cell of origin"],"tldr":"How closely a cancer cell still resembles the mature, specialised tissue it came from. Well-differentiated tumours look like their parent tissue and tend to behave better; poorly differentiated ones look primitive and grow faster.","summary":"Normal cells mature from stem cells into specialised types with fixed jobs; cancer partly reverses this, and the degree of reversal is a core component of tumour grade. Differentiation also determines which markers a tumour carries and which drugs reach it: a prostate cancer that dedifferentiates into a neuroendocrine form stops making PSA and stops responding to hormone therapy, and EGFR-mutant lung cancers can escape osimertinib by transforming into small-cell histology. A few drugs work by forcing differentiation, most famously all-trans retinoic acid, which makes the immature cells of acute promyelocytic leukaemia mature and die.","asOf":"2026-09-09","wikipedia":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_differentiation","links":[{"label":"Wikipedia","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_differentiation"}],"tags":[],"related":["tumour-grade","histology","stem-cell","resistance","cancer-stem-cells-plasticity"],"cancers":["prostate","nsclc","sclc"],"sections":[],"technologies":[],"targets":[],"drugs":[],"companies":[],"institutions":[],"pathways":[],"terms":[],"trials":[],"people":[],"bottlenecks":[],"keyPapers":[],"journals":[],"dependsOn":[],"notes":[],"category":"Biology basics"},"route":"/terms/differentiation/","neighbours":{"term":[{"id":"resistance","kind":"term","name":"Drug resistance (primary and acquired)","route":"/terms/resistance/"},{"id":"tumour-grade","kind":"term","name":"Grade","route":"/terms/tumour-grade/"},{"id":"histology","kind":"term","name":"Histology","route":"/terms/histology/"},{"id":"stem-cell","kind":"term","name":"Stem cell","route":"/terms/stem-cell/"}],"pathway":[{"id":"cancer-stem-cells-plasticity","kind":"pathway","name":"Cancer stem cells & phenotypic plasticity","route":"/pathways/cancer-stem-cells-plasticity/"}],"cancer":[{"id":"nsclc","kind":"cancer","name":"Non-small-cell lung cancer","route":"/cancers/nsclc/"},{"id":"prostate","kind":"cancer","name":"Prostate cancer","route":"/cancers/prostate/"},{"id":"sclc","kind":"cancer","name":"Small-cell lung cancer","route":"/cancers/sclc/"}]}}