The cellular components of tumors and their microenvironment play pivotal roles intumor progression, patient survival, and the response to cancer treatments.
In my doctoral thesis, I describe a new way to extract transcriptional signatures from
gene expression data of tumor components and microenvironments and access their influence
on cancer patients.
Tumor immune infiltration has been studied for years for its high correlation with
patients’ survival. Many immune therapies are dependent on the detection and quantification
of cell types present in bulk tumors. Bulk tumor microenvironment deconvolution has been
largely limited by the low number of cell-type signatures. Leveraging cell type signatures derived
from scRNA-seq data provides a broader range of cell types in the detection and quantification of
tumor infiltration, therefore helping in developing cancer immunotherapy and targeted cancer
therapies.
I developed a new method called scBeacon, a novel tool that derives cell-type signatures
by integrating and clustering multiple scRNA-seq datasets to extract signatures from
public data consortiums while minimizing batch effects. I derived a comprehensive set of human
cell-type signatures from Single Cell Expression Atlas and performed TCGA bulk tumors deconvolution analysis using the cell-type signature profile. These cell type estimates enable
the detection of a pan-cancer high-risk sample group that is not detected by traditional gene
expression analysis.
Cancers are traditionally classified into types and subtypes by the organ and cell of origin.
However, there are tumor samples that consist of a mixture of cancer subtypes which raise
challenges in characterizing the subtype profile for mixture samples. Inspired by the scBeacon
deconvolution analysis, I used a similar approach to detect and quantify the subtypes in testicular
germ cell cancer mixture samples. In addition, I used single-cell RNA-seq signatures
to characterize the major cell types and their differential states in testicular germ cell cancer
samples.
For glioblastoma, I used predefined cell state marker genes to deconvolute bulk glioblastoma
tumors using a hierarchical deconvolution approach. It proved using hierarchical deconvolution
addresses the nature of cell type differentiation, which could give a finer resolution
for deconvolution, especially when some rare cell types come from a subpopulation of a very
similar cell type. This approach is particularly useful for brain tissue deconvolution because of
the complexity of cell type lineages in brain development.