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Biology subjects

Fridman, W. H.

Publications and source records attributed to Fridman, W. H..

5 recordsLinked to original sources

A deep learning-based multiscale integration of spatial omics with tumor morphology.

Spatial Transcriptomics (spTx) offers unprecedented insights into the spatial arrangement of the tumor microenvironment, tumor initiation/progression and identification of new therapeutic target candidates. However, spTx remains complex and unlikely to be routinely used in the near future. Hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) stained histological slides, on the other hand, are routinely generated for a large fraction of cancer patients. Here, we present a novel deep learning-based approach for multiscale integration of spTx with tumor morphology (MISO). We trained MISO to predict spTx from H&E on a new unpublished dataset of 72 10X Genomics Visium samples, and derived a novel estimate of the upper bound on the achievable performance. We demonstrate that MISO enables near single-cell-resolution, spatially-resolved gene expression prediction from H&E. In addition, MISO provides an effective patient representation framework that enables downstream predictive tasks such as molecular phenotyping or MSI prediction.

bioinformatics↗

webMCP-counter: a web interface for transcriptomics-based quantification of immune and stromal cells in heterogeneous human or murine samples

SummaryWe previously reported MCP-counter and mMCP-counter, methods that allow precise estimation of the immune and stromal composition of human and murine samples from bulk transcriptomic data, but they were only distributed as R packages. Here, we report webMCP-counter, a user-friendly web interface to allow all users to use these methods, regardless of their proficiency in the R programming language. Availability and ImplementationFreely available from http://134.157.229.105:3838/webMCP/. Website developed with the R package shiny. Source code available from GitHub: https://github.com/FPetitprez/webMCP-counter.

immunology↗

The murine Microenvironment Cell Population counter method to estimate abundance of tissue-infiltrating immune and stromal cell populations in murine samples using gene expression

Quantifying tissue-infiltrating immune and stromal cells provides clinically relevant information for various diseases, notably cancer. While numerous methods allow to quantify immune or stromal cells in human tissue samples based on transcriptomic data, very few are available for mouse studies. Here, we introduce murine Microenvironment Cell Population counter (mMCP-counter), a method based on highly specific transcriptomic markers that allow to accurately quantify 12 immune and 4 stromal murine cell populations. We validated mMCP-counter with flow cytometry data. We also showed that mMCP-counter outperforms existing methods. We showed in mouse models of mesothelioma and kidney cancer that mMCP-counter quantification scores are predictive of response to immune checkpoint blockade Finally, we illustrated mMCP-counters potential to analyze immune impacts of Alzheimers disease. mMCP-counter is available as an R package from GitHub: https://github.com/cit-bioinfo/mMCP-counter.

bioinformatics↗

MS.liverK: an R package for transcriptome-based computation of molecular subtypes and functional signatures in liver cancer

SummaryLiver cancer is a highly heterogeneous disease in terms of etiology, tissue and cellular morphology, tumor molecular characteristics, microenvironment composition and prognosis. Several studies, based on tumor gene-expression profiling (GEP) data, have dissected the molecular heterogeneity of liver cancer. They resulted in various tools, either delineating homogeneous tumor subtypes or calculating molecular scores of prognostic or biological functions. Here, we present MS.liverK, an easy-to-use R package providing a comprehensive implementation of these tools, for research use. Availability and implementationThe MS.liverK R package is available from GitHub (https://github.com/cit-bioinfo/MS.liverK).

bioinformatics↗

Comprehensive evaluation of cell-type quantification methods for immuno-oncology

MotivationThe composition and density of immune cells in the tumor microenvironment profoundly influence tumor progression and success of anti-cancer therapies. Flow cytometry, immunohistochemistry staining, or single-cell sequencing is often unavailable such that we rely on computational methods to estimate the immune-cell composition from bulk RNA-sequencing (RNA-seq) data. Various methods have been proposed recently, yet their capabilities and limitations have not been evaluated systematically. A general guideline leading the research community through cell type deconvolution is missing. ResultsWe developed a systematic approach for benchmarking such computational methods and assessed the accuracy of tools at estimating nine different immune- and stromal cells from bulk RNA-seq samples. We used a single-cell RNA-seq dataset of [~]11,000 cells from the tumor microenvironment to simulate bulk samples of known cell type proportions, and validated the results using independent, publicly available gold-standard estimates. This allowed us to analyze and condense the results of more than a hundred thousand predictions to provide an exhaustive evaluation across seven computational methods over nine cell types and [~]1,800 samples from five simulated and real-world datasets. We demonstrate that computational deconvolution performs at high accuracy for well-defined cell-type signatures and propose how fuzzy cell-type signatures can be improved. We suggest that future efforts should be dedicated to refining cell population definitions and finding reliable signatures. AvailabilityA snakemake pipeline to reproduce the benchmark is available at https://github.com/grst/immune_deconvolution_benchmark. An R package allows the community to perform integrated deconvolution using different methods (https://grst.github.io/immunedeconv). Contactg.sturm@tum.de Supplementary informationSupplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

bioinformatics↗