CCB Seminar: Learning cellular adaptations to cancer therapy through single-cell and spatial analyses of clinical specimens

Abstract: Intratumor heterogeneity is a barrier to cancer therapy. However, it is unknown to what extent standard-of-care therapy exerts a selection pressure on tumor or immune cell types, in the most common primary brain tumors. We report our recent efforts to model brain-tumor evolution under therapy via longitudinal studies of glioma and medulloblastoma clinical specimens. We describe our approach for integrating single-cell and spatial profiling of clinical specimens with single-cell genetic lineage tracing in vivo to understand how standard therapy influences malignant progression. We will highlight open computational challenges in the analysis of the multi-modal data that arise from these studies.