Pan-cancer single-cell landscape of tumor-infiltrating T cells
Liangtao Zheng, Shishang Qin, Wen Si, Anqiang Wang, Baocai Xing, Ranran Gao, Xianwen Ren, Li Wang, Xiaojiang Wu, Ji Zhang, Nan Wu, Ning Zhang, Hong Zheng, Hanqiang Ouyang, Keyuan Chen, Zhaode Bu, Xueda Hu, Jiafu Ji, Zemin Zhang
Abstract
An atlas of cancer-associated T cells The tumor microenvironment contains many different kinds of immune cells, the composition, function, and roles of which are unclear. Using single-cell RNA sequencing of T cells in 21 cancer types from more than 300 patients, Zheng et al . identified differences in transcript composition that could be used to catalog different T cell types (see the Perspective by van der Leun and Schumacher). These annotations identified the different roles of specific types of CD4 + and CD8 + T cells among the different tumor types. Some of these clusters revealed evidence for two developmental paths for T cells, one of which shows a trajectory toward the “exhausted” T cell state, knowledge of which may be useful in developing future cancer immunotherapies. —LMZ