Pan-cancer spatial characterization of key immune biomarkers in the tumor microenvironment

Abstract

Deciphering the composition and spatial organization of the tumor immune microenvironment (TiME) is key to uncovering the mechanisms driving cancer progression and treatment response. Spatial biology techniques like multiplex immunofluorescence (mIF) offer detailed insights into the TiME but are often limited to retrospective research studies of individual cancer types. Conversely, bulk omics techniques have been studied in pan-cancer settings but fail to capture single-cell spatial information. Here, we provide a pan-cancer spatial characterization of key biomarkers (CD8, FOXP3, PD-1, PD-L1) of the TiME using data from a mIF assay performed prospectively in a clinical setting on 2,019 tumors across 14 major cancer types. By integrating interpretable compositional and spatial metrics, we identified patterns of TiME variation that are conserved across cancer types and stages. We assess associations between these TiME spatial factors and tumor, genomic, and clinical features, where the results both extend prior findings and uncover new links. Altogether, our findings offer pan-cancer insights of the TiME to further the fields of spatial biology and cancer immunology.