Building a single cell and spatial tumor immune atlas for precision oncology

The tumor immune microenvironment plays a critical role in cancer progression and patient response to treatments. However, patient-to-patient differences complicate prognosis and stratification efforts, necessitating a comprehensive investigation of the cells that compose the tumor microenvironment and their relationships in morphological context. With a comprehensive compendium of tumor immune cells, researchers can pinpoint predictive cellular states, annotate their spatial localization, and thus make strides to understand the influence of the cellular and spatial architecture of the tumor immune microenvironment on cancer progression, treatment response, and prognosis, and identify precision immunotherapy targets. 

In this webinar sponsored by 10x Genomics and Illumina, Dr. Holger Heyn of the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology will discuss efforts to combine single cell and spatial transcriptomics to generate this comprehensive tumor immune atlas across cancer types.

Topics to be covered include:

• Efforts to generate a single cell tumor immune atlas, composed of more than 500,000 cells from 217 patients and 13 cancer types

• Development of an automated cell annotation system for a harmonized interpretation of tumors leveraging the tumor immune atlas as a baseline

• SPOTlight, a method of tissue analysis that enables in situ mapping of immune populations for digital pathology by combining single cell and spatial transcriptomics data

Speaker:

Holger Heyn, PhD
Team Leader at the National Centre for Genomic Analysis (CNAG-CRG), Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology