New imaging method links cells' spatial organization to cancer outcomes
Tumors are not made up of cancer cells alone. They also contain immune cells and other support cells that interact within a complex ecosystem known as the tumor microenvironment. A doctoral thesis by Linglong Huang at the Karolinska Institutet's Department of Oncology-Pathology suggests that the spatial organization of cells in solid tumors may provide clinically relevant information about…
New research from Karolinska Institutet suggests that the way cells are arranged within solid tumors could provide valuable insights into patient outcomes and biological processes across different cancer types. Linglong Huang, a doctoral candidate, developed a novel imaging method that analyzes tissue images without needing to precisely define cell boundaries, making it suitable for studying irregularly shaped cells like fibroblasts.
This technique revealed that cells surrounding blood vessels in colorectal tumors tend to organize into distinct layers, and specific patterns in their arrangement were associated with worse patient outcomes. Additionally, macrophages, a type of immune cell, were not distributed randomly. By treating tissue sections as snapshots of ongoing processes, researchers could reconstruct how macrophages dispersed from blood vessels into the surrounding tissue, with certain dispersal patterns linked to shorter survival.
The study also examined over 7,900 tumor images from 21 cancer types and found that cell density was correlated with gene activity related to mechanical forces within tissues and the presence of a specific type of memory T cell. This implies that the physical structure of tumors may offer information about biological processes across various cancer types.
The research also explored how the tumor ecosystem changes during cancer recurrence, revealing that certain immune cells could suppress the body's immune response instead of combating the tumor. In mouse models, blocking a specific molecule disrupted this interaction and enhanced the response to immunotherapy. Overall, the findings highlight the potential of spatial cell organization in tumors to complement existing cancer research approaches, and the researchers have developed a computational framework to facilitate further analysis of spatial patterns in tumor tissues.
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