Lay summary
Cancer cells within single tumours are not all the same. Consequently, drug therapies often fail to kill the entire cancer, leading to rapid relapse. Recently it has become possible to determine the gene expression patterns of thousands of individual cells within a tumour, enabling the heterogeneity within tumours to be observed. We will use single cell RNA sequencing to characterise the cellular heterogeneity within a mouse model of diffuse-type gastric cancer, before and after treatment with a panel of promising drugs. This data will be used to select drugs or drug combinations which can stop the growth of all sub-populations, not just the dominant one. Preferred drugs, and surrogate cellular markers of drug efficacy, will be validated in a novel human ex-vivo stomach model of hereditary diffuse gastric cancer prior to later clinical trials.