Digital spatial profiling of the microenvironment of muscle invasive bladder cancer.
Commun Biol
; 7(1): 737, 2024 Jun 18.
Article
in En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-38890455
ABSTRACT
Muscle invasive bladder cancer (MIBC) is a molecularly diverse disease with varied clinical outcomes. Molecular studies typically employ bulk sequencing analysis, giving a transcriptomic snapshot of a section of the tumour. However, tumour tissues are not homogeneous, but are composed of distinct compartments such as the tumour and stroma. To investigate the molecular profiles of bladder cancer, whilst also maintaining the spatial complexity of the tumours, we employed whole transcriptome Digital Spatial Profiling (DSP). With this method we generated a dataset of transcriptomic profiles of tumour epithelium, stroma, and immune infiltrate. With these data we investigate the spatial relationship of molecular subtype signatures and ligand signalling events. We find that Basal/Squamous and Classical subtypes are mostly restricted to tumour regions, while the stroma-rich subtype signatures are abundant within the stroma itself. Additionally, we identify ligand signalling events occurring between tumour, stroma, and immune infiltrate regions, such as immune infiltrate derived GPNMB, which was highly correlated with VEGFA expression within the tumour. These findings give us new insights into the diversity of MIBC at a molecular level and provide a dataset with detailed spatial information that was not available before in bladder cancer research.
Full text:
1
Collection:
01-internacional
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
Urinary Bladder Neoplasms
/
Tumor Microenvironment
Limits:
Humans
Language:
En
Journal:
Commun Biol
Year:
2024
Document type:
Article
Affiliation country:
Reino Unido