Abstract 3456
Background
Tumor pathologists classify tumors according to cell-level and tissue-level criteria, using molecular markers in addition to morphological patterns, as reported in WHO tumor classifications. Their work describes to some extent both inter-tumor and intra-tumor heterogeneity, but it is a tedious task with potential reproducibility issues. The molecular subtyping of tumors represents a sometimes parallel and sometimes convergent effort to describe the heterogeneity of tumors. It is automated, which attenuates the limitations of pathological scoring mentioned above, but so far it is poorly adapted to describe intra-tumor heterogeneity.
Methods
We propose a novel method, WISP (Weighted In Silico Pathology), which finely measures intra-tumor heterogeneity by automatically estimating the proportions of cell types present in a bulk tumor sample, these cell types being predefined based on histological or high-throughput molecular criterions.
Results
We illustrate the relevance of our approach in several tumor types including lung cancer, glioblastoma and pancreatic cancer. We show that the cell types that describe tumors for a given cancer type can fairly well recapitulate existing molecular classifications and are very consistent with an independent pathological scoring. We show that our method offers a more standardized and finer-grained solution for describing tumor heterogeneity than either pathological scoring or molecular subtyping. More importantly, we show that the proportion of certain cell types is strongly associated to prognosis and drug response.
Conclusions
This study provides a framework for standardized molecular pathology and fully reshapes the way in which we think about pathology or molecular subtyping. We believe that our results are a proof of concept demonstrating the importance of considering cell types intra-tumor proportions for personalized clinical care.
Clinical trial identification
Editorial acknowledgement
Legal entity responsible for the study
The authors.
Funding
CIT Program - Ligue Contre le Cancer.
Disclosure
All authors have declared no conflicts of interest.
Resources from the same session
5037 - CXCR4, CCR2 and CCR5 expression in subsets of tumor cells with stem and/or EMT features
Presenter: Olga Savelieva
Session: Poster Display session 1
Resources:
Abstract
5729 - Expression of mutant p53 affects cancer cell sensitivity to topotecan
Presenter: Rimma Mingaleeva
Session: Poster Display session 1
Resources:
Abstract
5725 - Breast cancer organoids a new tool for the prediction of drugs penetration and patient’outcome
Presenter: Giuseppina Roscigno
Session: Poster Display session 1
Resources:
Abstract
5680 - Aptamer-mediated exosomes detection for early breast cancer identification.
Presenter: Cristina Quintavalle
Session: Poster Display session 1
Resources:
Abstract
2460 - MicroRNA-181c promotes tamoxifen resistance in breast cancer cells via upregulation Akt/mTOR axis
Presenter: Alexander Scherbakov
Session: Poster Display session 1
Resources:
Abstract
3751 - Spatio-temporal separation of tumor infiltrating CD8+ T-cells and HER2/neu+ tumor cells in tumor-immune milieu of infiltrating ductal carcinoma of the breast
Presenter: Sandhya Sreedharan
Session: Poster Display session 1
Resources:
Abstract
4664 - Large genomic rearrangements in BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes in the Portuguese population.
Presenter: Joao Pinto
Session: Poster Display session 1
Resources:
Abstract
4611 - Non-BRCA1/2 hereditary breast and ovarian cancer: findings from a multidisciplinary program
Presenter: Ana Monteiro
Session: Poster Display session 1
Resources:
Abstract
5340 - Quantitative imaging and characterization of collagen patterns in high grade serous ovarian carcinoma (HGSOC)
Presenter: Ruby Huang
Session: Poster Display session 1
Resources:
Abstract
4209 - Semiquantitative assessment of vimentin expression in prostate cancer (PC)
Presenter: Marina Puchinskaya
Session: Poster Display session 1
Resources:
Abstract