George Kumar, Senior Director at AstraZeneca, shared on LinkedIn:
“Mapping the Neighborhood Before Breast Cancer Invades.
Most DCIS will never threaten a patient’s life. Some will. We still can’t reliably tell which is which, and a big part of the reason is how little we know about the tissue around the cancer cells.
A new study tackles that gap with a large cellular atlas of the tumor microenvironment (TME) in estrogen-receptor positive ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), the most common preinvasive breast cancer.
What the team did:
- Collected fresh tissue across the disease spectrum: normal breast, DCIS and invasive breast cancer
- Profiled 854,911 cells from 159 patients by single-cell RNA sequencing
- Added spatial transcriptomics on 39 samples to see where each cell sits
- Defined 9 cell types and 60 distinct cell states
What they found:
- Fibroblasts, vascular cells and basal cells are remodeled in the tissue surrounding DCIS regions
- Some ducts become immunosuppressive, creating conditions that support growth of the preinvasive cancer cells
- Many of these microenvironment changes are already present in DCIS and persist into invasive disease
Why it matters:
Progression risk in DCIS may be written as much in the surrounding stroma and immune landscape as in the cancer cells themselves. A reference atlas like this gives us candidate cell states and spatial patterns to test as risk biomarkers, which is exactly what’s needed to separate lesions that warrant treatment from those that could safely be monitored.
For those of us in pathology and diagnostics, it’s also a reminder that the next generation of DCIS risk tools will likely need spatial context, not just tumor-cell markers.
What would it take to turn TME signatures like these into a test a pathologist could use?
Figure Courtesy: Science. Nicholas Navin. UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX, USA”
Title: A cellular atlas of the preinvasive breast cancer microenvironment
Authors:
Siyuan He, Aatish Thennavan, Runmin Wei, Shanshan Bai, Jianzhuo Li, Chante Bethell, Emi Sei, Mitchell Rao, Tapsi Kumar, Chenling Tang, Ivan Marin, Jessica Montalvan, Chandandeep Nagi, Bora Lim, Savitri Krishnamurthy, Alastair Thompson, Nicholas Navin
You can also read:
Kefah Mokbel: Does the Conventional Precursor Model Fully Explain DCIS?
