A single biopsy from a metastatic breast cancer tumor contains hundreds of thousands of cells—some cancerous and others part of the complex web of immune cells, blood vessels, and supportive tissue that surround a tumor. Researchers have typically analyzed these cells as a mixed-together group, but this approach can miss rare cell types, and makes it difficult to draw conclusions about how cells interact to drive the disease. Now, a team of researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, and the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich has shown that state-of-the-art methods that analyze cells individually or within intact tissue can reveal new insight into the diversity of cells that make up metastatic breast cancers.
Their study, published in Nature Medicine , also provides a resource for scientists to help guide future experiments. The team compared six different high-resolution gene expression analysis methods, including four spatial profiling approaches, which map the location of cells within a tissue and reveal new details about which cells interact with each other and how. The researchers reported how well the methods worked to capture different cellular characteristics of the tumors and surrounding tissue.
The results pave the way for future single-cell or spatially resolved studies that look at how cells surrounding a metastatic tumor impact its progression or treatment outcomes. "Methods that analyze each si.