Poster Presentation NSW State Cancer Conference 2023

Detection of spatially-resolved cell-cell interaction across cancer tissue sections (#216)

Minh Tran 1 , Andrew Xu 2 , Quan Nguyen 2
  1. Faculty of Medicine and Health, Randwick, NSW, Australia
  2. Institute for Molecular Bioscience, The University of Queensland, IMB, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

Aberrant cell-cell communication between spatially adjacent cells drives cancer progression and metastasis. Spatial transcriptomic and multiplexed immunohistochemistry imaging has revolutionised our ability to study the expression of transcripts and proteins within tissue sections. The advances in spatial -omics technologies also enable us to analyse the composition of cell types and investigate their interactions through ligand-receptor interactions. In this study, we present a highly quantitative analysis pipeline designed to investigate cell-cell interactions and tissue heterogeneity. Our pipeline demonstrates remarkable versatility and can be applied to various spatial transcriptomic and proteomic datasets. Furthermore, we validated the results of our analysis pipeline against pathological annotations, revealing a strong correlation. As more advanced multiplexed imaging platforms continue to emerge, we anticipate a growing demand for our analysis pipeline, as it holds great potential for unravelling spatial cell-cell interactions in diverse biological contexts.