A new paper in Cancer Cell should be a great resource in future work on immunotherapy.
Immunotherapy is currently the best method to treat many cancers, but its success is mixed, and long-term side effects occur too. Investigating bulk data is hard without single cell reference because immune cells change gene expression dramatically during immune response and this creates cell subtypes not present in resources like Protein Atlas.
Li et al., 2023, Cancer Cell 41, “Remodeling of the immune and stromal cell compartment by PD-1 blockade in mismatch repair- deficient colorectal cancer” produced single-cell snapshots of tumors and stroma before the therapy and six cycles after therapy start, and additionally annotated the samples with the outcomes: success = pCR and failure = non-pCR. The paper provides a guide to markers of cell subtypes created during the therapy and subtypes associated with the outcomes. Importantly, in the future studies, both bulk and single cell, data deposited by this project may help interpreting expression of genes that are not highlighted in the text of the paper.
Great work by scientists from Guangzhou, I hope to see more such resources in the future.
Jieun Jeong (정지은), Ph.D. 