Single cell studies of immunity in tumor microenvironment and autoimmune diseases

Advancements in single cell technologies have transformed our ability to investigate cellular composition in both healthy and diseases conditions. Multimodal single cell measurements of cell states through protein abundance, gene expression, epigenetics, genotype and spatial organization provide high-resolution view of the cellular states and enable the identification of new biological processes.

Single cell approaches are particularly powerful for addressing several of the outstanding questions of immunity such as the failure of immune self-tolerance that leads to autoimmune condition and immune evasion by tumor cells. In this talk I will provide an overview of single cell technologies. I will present how these methods were used to identify a new class of progenitor CD8 cells that drive Type I diabetes (Gearty et al., 2022) and how the tumor immune microenvironment can shape response to immune therapy (Chandran S.S et al., 2022).

References

Chandran S.S, Ma J., Klatt MG., Dündar F, Bandlamudi C, Razavi P, Wen HY, Weigelt B, Zumbo P, Fu SN, et al. (2022). Immunogenicity and therapeutic targeting of a public neoantigen derived from mutated PIK3CA. Nature Medicine.

Gearty, S.V., Dundar, F., Zumbo, P., Espinosa-Carrasco, G., Shakiba, M., Sanchez-Rivera, F.J., Socci, N.D., Trivedi, P., Lowe, S.W., Lauer, P., et al. (2022). An autoimmune stem-like CD8 T cell population drives type 1 diabetes. Nature 602, 156-161.