IMC Trending Topics News
→ 2023
- A summary of Distinguishing keratoacanthoma from well-differentiated cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma using single-cell spatial pathology by Veenstra et al. published in the December 2023 issue of the Journal of Investigative Dermatology highlights the use of RNA sequencing and Imaging Mass Cytometry to find features that differentiate keratoacanthoma and cutaneous squamous cell cancer.
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Congratulations to Akil Merchant and team at Cedars-Sinai Cancer on their recent publication in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. The work outlines a new way to predict whether lymphoma will recur in patients treated with a bone marrow transplant and is one of the first to use spatial profiling to predict patient outcomes that could lead to more precisely targeted treatment.
“This work opens new avenues for the development of spatial biomarkers that can guide treatment of cancer patients in a precise, targeted way,” said Dan Theodorescu, MD, PhD, Director of Cedars-Sinai Cancer and the PHASE ONE Distinguished Chair. “Translation of this leading-edge research to a test that can be clinically deployed will help bring the promise of precision medicine to increasing numbers of patients – and will eventually benefit patients with many cancer types.”
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A press release from Oncolytics Biotech® describes how novel IMC technology enables a closer look at the TME post-pelareorep/atezolizumab/letrozole treatment and affirms pelareorep’s ability to increase PD-L1 positive cells and T cell infiltration in the TME.
The positive translational data, presented at the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer’s (SITC) 38th Annual Meeting, completes the AWARE-1 breast cancer window-of-opportunity study and supports conduct of a registrational program for pelareorep.
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- Laura Kuett recently completed her PhD at the University of Zurich and talked to SLAS Europe 2023 about her work using 3D Imaging Mass Cytometry to advance breast cancer research.
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Read the interview - In an October webinar presented through Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News, Sammy Ferri-Borgogno, an Instructor in the Department of Gynecologic Oncology and Reproductive Medicine at MD Anderson Cancer Center, discussed how a multi-omic approach to tissue imaging can reliably characterize the tumor microenvironment (TME) in ovarian cancer.
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- Congratulations to the Ali Group at Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, in collaboration with Fondazione Michelangelo and San Raffaele Hospital in Milan, on their recent study using 660 tumor biopsy samples from patients with triple negative breast cancer before, during and after treatment to map tissue structure and identify unique predictors of whether a patient would respond to treatment.
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Chandra Mohan, Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Endowed Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Houston, demonstrated the first use of Imaging Mass Cytometry to examine the kidneys of patients with lupus and inform diagnoses of lupus nephritis in those patients.
IMC represents a significant step forward by evaluating the presence of 40-plus markers simultaneously over the traditional approach, which allows the examination of only 1–3 distinct proteins within a specific tissue.
“Due to unique advantages that allow high-dimensional tissue profiling, we postulated Imaging Mass Cytometry may shed novel insights on the molecular makeup of proliferative lupus nephritis,” Mohan reports in the journal Clinical Immunology. “This study interrogates the expression profiles of 50 target proteins in lupus nephritis and control kidneys.”
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- In a presentation given at the 2023 Kidney Cancer Research Summit (KCRS), Hartland Jackson, PhD, an investigator at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute of Sinai Health and an associate scientist at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, discussed strategies for mapping spatially resolved immune cell networks in clear cell renal cell carcinoma. Such networks may be appropriate targets for immunotherapy and how IMC can be used for spatial immune profiling.
- Biomedical Picture of the Day posted by the MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences: Using Imaging Mass Cytometry and single-cell RNA sequencing helps in understanding the composition and spatial changes of the ulcerative colitis ecosystem, in which inflammatory macrophages replace resident macrophages.
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- A recent study using Imaging Mass Cytometry, led by surgeon-scientist Juliet Emamaullee, MD, PhD, found that T cells expressing programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1) were present in biopsies from children who recovered from acute liver failure without needing a liver transplant, but not in those who received a transplant.
“These cells are relatively rare; they’re less than 1% of the cells that we see in the biopsy,” Dr. Emamaullee says. “It’s only because of this technology and this advanced analysis that we were able to find them. Using older techniques, you would never know they were there.”
The team presented its findings in plenary sessions at the 2023 International Congress of the International Liver Transplantation Society and at the 2023 American Transplant Congress. - BNA2023 video | Advantages and disadvantages of Imaging Mass Cytometry in Alzheimer’s disease studies: In an interview recorded at a British Neuroscience Association (BNA) conference, Alessia Caramello, PhD, Imperial College London, commented on the advantages and challenges of using Imaging Mass Cytometry to study neuronal subpopulations in Alzheimer’s disease.
- Sabelo Lukhele, PhD, David Brooks, PhD, and team at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre have figured out a way to help T cells overcome exhaustion and sustain antitumor activity. Their new published study paves the way for enhanced cancer therapies by revealing a key driver of immune exhaustion.
The team suggests that targeting interferon regulatory factor 2 (IRF2), which drives exhaustion of the immune system during immunotherapy, might be key to overcoming treatment failure. - The McGill University teams that authored two recently published papers in Nature were the focus of Nature Research Highlights. The article nicely sums up the studies and how the landscape of the spatial tumor immune microenvironment adds prognostic value to identifying clinically relevant predictive immune markers in lung and brain tumors.
- Congratulations to Newcastle University’s Professor Andy Filby, part of the Faculty of Medical Sciences, for being appointed Professor of Practice in Enabling Technologies. Filby is currently Director of the Flow Cytometry Core Facility and leads the Innovation, Methodology and Applications theme. His appointment celebrates a technical member of staff successfully moving into a unique role built on their specialist expertise.
- E. John Wherry, PhD, Director of the Institute for Immunology, Chair of the Department of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics and the Richard and Barbara Schiffrin President’s Distinguished Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, has received the 2023 AACR-CRI Lloyd J. Old Award in Cancer Immunology. Congratulations to Wherry for being recognized as an active scientist whose innovative research has had a major impact on the cancer field and has the potential to stimulate new directions in cancer immunology.
- April 29 was International Day of Immunology 2023. This year’s theme was Immunology Talks to Public Health, in an effort to increase global awareness of the importance of immunology and demonstrate how our understanding of human immunology can improve public health.
- Hartland Jackson and team were awarded a grant from the Canadian Cancer Society as part of the largest collective multidisciplinary research team of clinicians, scientists and patient partners focused on high-performance research to improve outcomes for low-survival cancers. This will leverage IMC in a multipronged approach to accelerate the translation of preclinical findings to the next generation of patient-centered clinical trials.
- Two Canadian research teams used IMC to investigate the immune landscapes of tumors, with their articles published in Nature on the same day. One team combined Imaging Mass Cytometry and AI to develop an approach to predict which lung cancer patients will progress after surgery; the other team used IMC to identify a population of myeloperoxidase-positive macrophages associated with long-term glioblastoma survival.
- Surgeon-scientists at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, the US leader in liver transplants performed at a pediatric center, are using IMC to investigate the mechanisms of transplant rejection and develop novel biomarkers to better diagnose, treat and predict rejection in children. CHLA scientists are also advancing the understanding of liver development and conditions such as nonalcoholic fatty liver disease and biliary atresia, the most common cause of liver transplantation in children.
- A research paper in Oncotarget used Imaging Mass Cytometry to help identify factors in the tumor microenvironment (TME) that increase tumor progression and immune tolerance in breast cancer. To see whether tolerance was associated with PD-1, researchers utilized IMC to help monitor drug response. Their findings may shed further light on therapeutic options that could enhance PD-1 immune checkpoint sensitivity, including the use of TME-targeted agents and Wnt pathway inhibitors.
- The Journal of Clinical Oncology published a paper looking at how treatment with pembrolizumab affects localized unresectable or high-risk resectable microsatellite instability high (MSI-H)/deficient mismatch repair (dMMR) tumors in the neoadjuvant space. The team’s exploratory analyses included interrogation of the tumor immune microenvironment using IMC, and researchers concluded that neoadjuvant pembrolizumab in dMMR/MSI-H cancers is safe and resulted in high rates of pathologic, radiographic and endoscopic response.
→ 2022
- Congratulations to the five Canadian cancer research teams that won the 2022 Terry Fox New Frontiers Program Project Grant competition! The teams will be able to expand their research into key areas of cancer treatment.
One of the longstanding award holders, a team led by Dr. Christian Steidl, head of lymphoid cancer research at BC Cancer, continues its groundbreaking research using novel technologies, including single-cell sequencing and Imaging Mass Cytometry™, to describe changes in tumors, cell by cell, and visualize the altered micro-architecture of lymph nodes.
“I am optimistic in saying with the depth and breadth of information we can derive from these samples, we can build complete models of how lymphoma evolves, and we can translate these results into novel therapies to obtain higher cure rates and fewer side effects for patients,” Steidl said in a press release.
- At the American Society of Nephrology Kidney Week in November, Lloyd Cantley, MD, Professor, Vice Chair of Research and Co-Director of Education, Yale Center for Clinical Investigation, presented Spatial Analysis of the Kidney: Imaging Mass Cytometry of the Human Kidney. The meeting brings together kidney professionals from around the globe to exchange new research findings, learn about the latest clinical and scientific advances in the field and engage in exciting discussion with leading international experts.
- The Bodenmiller Lab released the newest versions of their imcdatasets, cytomapper and imcRtools RStats packages on Bioconductor. These packages form a software suite to analyze and visualize highly multiplexed imaging data. The imcdatasets package provides direct access to publicly available Imaging Mass Cytometry datasets. The cytomapper package allows the visualization of multichannel image composites and maps single-cell information to segmentation masks. The imcRtools package provides spatial single-cell analysis approaches to characterize tissue structures and cell interactions.
- The Black in Cancer Conference was held in collaboration with Cancer Research UK, showcasing new findings from cancer researchers around the world and including tools to model single-cell biology data from technologies like Imaging Mass Cytometry.
- An Imaging Mass Cytometry workshop kicked off Spatial Biology US, a meeting for those integrating spatial biology and multi-omics approaches into their research. Presenters discussed the latest advancements in applying spatial data to garner deeper insights and overcoming key analysis challenges.
- Congratulations to Chun Chen at the Wellcome Centre for Mitochondrial Research, Translational and Clinical Research Institute, Newcastle University, for two recent first-author papers using Imaging Mass Cytometry to understand mitochondrial OXPHOS protein deficiency on Parkinson’s midbrain neurons and astrocytes.
- Thank you to Thomas Ashhurst, PhD, for presenting his work at this month’s CYTO® 2022 workshop – Integration and Analysis of High-Dimensional Single-Cell Cytometry and Imaging Data in a Murine Model of Viral Encephalitis.
- Adriano Luca Martinelli and Maria Anna Rapsomaniki at IBM Research Europe in Zurich introduced a new computational framework, ATHENA, that facilitates the visualization, processing and analysis of tumor heterogeneity from spatial omics measurements, including from Imaging Mass Cytometry.
- Melissa B. Davis participated in a National Breast Cancer Coalition panel discussion on healthcare disparities in the US and how to facilitate change in the movement toward health equity for all. She was also interviewed for the broadcast news story, “Racial and ethnic disparities in breast cancer outcomes,” which appeared on NY1 News on May 4.
- Thanks to Anne Bärenwaldt at University of Bern and Inselspital who collaborated with us for a great Helios™ and Hyperion Imaging System kickoff in May! What a great Imaging Mass Cytometry community in Switzerland.
- Congratulations to Tobias Boettler and team at the University of Freiburg for their April publication exploring the pathophysiology of known cases of liver inflammation following SARS-CoV-2 infection or vaccination. The study used Imaging Mass Cytometry for spatial immune profiling of liver biopsy tissue.
- Thank you to the Abu Dhabi Stem Cells Center for their time training with the team of Antonio Bencomo-Hernandez on the Hyperion Imaging System. We can't wait to see the results from this amazing team on stem cell therapy research!
- Kudos to the Newcastle University Flow Cytometry Core Facility, which supported a new publication by Jack Leslie, Derek Mann and team with some nice data on the Hyperion Imaging System describing how manipulation of neutrophils assists immunotherapy for liver cancer.
- Congratulations to Mathieu Lajoie at the Goodman Cancer Institute, McGill University, whose spatial graph image is on the April 2022 Science Immunology cover! Mathieu is an author on the recent paper, Spatially mapping the immune landscape of melanoma using Imaging Mass Cytometry, in which the team used IMC to characterize the immune microenvironment of melanoma patient samples, allowing for the identification of prognostic biomarkers for immunotherapy.
- ImaBiotech will present a new "Immune Signature Panel" as part of its Imaging Mass Cytometry Services at the AACR22 meeting in New Orleans. Read the news!
- Here’s a great read about the IMMUcan project and how researchers are working toward highly personalized tumor profiling for cancer patients. Daniel Schulz, PhD, and the project team use IMC to generate images from small tissue sections and have developed an approach to zoom in on select regions that capture the immune cell heterogeneity.
- In early February, the winners of the 2022 Terry Fox New Investigator Award were announced. One of the winners is Hartland Jackson, PhD, an investigator at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute at Sinai Health. With this grant, Jackson’s team will use IMC, digital pathology and systems biology to better understand how the Hippo pathway controls immune response to cancer.
- Researchers from the King’s College London Schools of Cancer and Pharmaceutical Sciences and Immunology and Microbial Sciences and the Cancer Systems Biology laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute, led by Francesca Ciccarelli, PhD, have developed a new software for the analysis of data from multiplexed imaging technologies such as IMC. “When we started to work with high-dimensional IMC data a couple of years ago, there were not many tools for their analysis,” Ciccarelli says. “It has been a lot of fun to develop our own tool thanks to the talent of Michele Bortolomeazzi, a PhD student” funded by the Cancer Research UK King's Health Partners Centre.
- A team at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles is turning to IMC to assist in its search for acute liver failure biomarkers in children. Johanna Ascher Bartlett, MD, a pediatric gastroenterology fellow, received a Broad Clinical Research Fellowship Award from USC to support her study. The team is examining 25 different immune cell markers in an effort to identify a predictive pattern that could indicate patient outcome and potentially save children from undergoing transplants and immunosuppression.
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