Tracing the Spatiotemporal Evolution of Cancer
Tumor progression is characterized by dynamic interactions between cancer cells and their surrounding tumor microenvironment. Studying the spatiotemporal evolution of tumors can provide insights into how intrinsic changes to cancer cells and extrinsic changes to the microenvironment cooperate to drive different stages of tumor progression.
In this webinar presented by Stanford University scientist Matthew Jones, PhD, high-resolution spatial transcriptomics coupled with evolvable lineage-tracing technologies elucidated how tumor expansion, plasticity, and metastasis co-evolve with microenvironmental remodeling in a lung adenocarcinoma model. Complementary spatial transcriptomics technologies – Seeker™ and Trekker™ – were used to dissect the microenvironmental associations of evolutionary trajectories derived from lineage-tracing studies. Integrating these spatial analyses with the phylodynamic measurements of tumor fitness and plasticity suggests subclonal tumor expansion may lead to a hypoxic environment associated with immunosuppressive and fibrotic cell states. Finally, data from this study demonstrates that a spatially-resolved lineage analysis of metastatic progression reveals that metastases arise from spatially-confined subclones and continue to remodel the distant metastatic niche into a fibrotic, collagen-rich microenvironment.
