Interrogation of the Microenvironmental Landscape in Brain Tumors Reveals Disease-Specific Alterations of Immune Cells. Academic Article uri icon

Overview

abstract

  • Brain malignancies encompass a range of primary and metastatic cancers, including low-grade and high-grade gliomas and brain metastases (BrMs) originating from diverse extracranial tumors. Our understanding of the brain tumor microenvironment (TME) remains limited, and it is unknown whether it is sculpted differentially by primary versus metastatic disease. We therefore comprehensively analyzed the brain TME landscape via flow cytometry, RNA sequencing, protein arrays, culture assays, and spatial tissue characterization. This revealed disease-specific enrichment of immune cells with pronounced differences in proportional abundance of tissue-resident microglia, infiltrating monocyte-derived macrophages, neutrophils, and T cells. These integrated analyses also uncovered multifaceted immune cell activation within brain malignancies entailing converging transcriptional trajectories while maintaining disease- and cell-type-specific programs. Given the interest in developing TME-targeted therapies for brain malignancies, this comprehensive resource of the immune landscape offers insights into possible strategies to overcome tumor-supporting TME properties and instead harness the TME to fight cancer.

publication date

  • May 28, 2020

Research

keywords

  • Brain Neoplasms
  • Glioma
  • Tumor Microenvironment

Identity

PubMed Central ID

  • PMC8558904

Scopus Document Identifier

  • 85086386623

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

  • 10.1016/j.cell.2020.05.007

PubMed ID

  • 32470396

Additional Document Info

volume

  • 181

issue

  • 7