Pan-cancer association of a mitochondrial function score with genomic alterations and clinical outcome

Abstract Mitochondria are pivotal in cellular energy metabolism and have garnered significant attention for their roles in cancer progression and therapy resistance. Despite this, the functional diversity of mitochondria across various cancer types remains inadequately characterized. This study seeks to fill this knowledge gap by introducing and validating MitoScore—a novel metric designed to quantitatively assess mitochondrial function across a wide array of cancers. Our investigation evaluates the capacity of MitoScore not only to distinguish between tumor and adjacent normal tissues