Living in a Spatial World: Characterizing the Immune Environment in Tumors

Description Immunotherapy has transformed the treatment of metastatic and recurrent solid tumors. Advances in technology in the past few years have created unprecedented opportunities to better identify biomarkers of disease processes, especially by using multi-omics technologies and datasets to derive valid and useful signatures of disease. Despite these advances, today only a minority of patients respond to immunotherapies. Prediction of response to therapies such as checkpoint inhibitors that rely on activation of endogenous immune responses has been shown to be especially difficult due to complex and heterogeneous immune escape mechanisms in each patient. Increasing evidence suggests that measurement of robust biomarkers through spatial analysis of the tissue will be key to enable rational patient selection for an improved clinical trial process and design precise combination therapies. To date, much of what has been learned about the tumor microenvironment (TME) has come from the use of IHC, but information has been limited by labor-intensive protocols that yield single data points. IHC method sare therefore not sufficient for generating the comprehensive and interactive picture of the TME landscape. Newer technological approaches, such as multiplex immunofluorescence (mIF), provide greater resolution, better use of precious samples, and unparalleled insight into the spatial cellular arrangement within the tumor. The quantitative assessment of the accuracy and precision of such multiplex panels however is key for their widespread use in clinical samples.