Co-Executive Director, Institute for Genomic Medicine Nationwide Children's Hospital, Ohio, United States
One current aspect of research in pediatric brain tumors involves the investigation of changes in the infiltration of immune cells into the tumor microenvironment during progression. This interest reflects the results of studies from adult GBM, illustrating that macrophage infiltration sets up an immunosuppressive environment. As such, information obtained from these studies of the tumor immune microenvironment may yield insights into the development of new immunotherapy-based treatments or the use of existing immunotherapies. Our lab has focused on the use of technologies to decipher changes in the immune microenvironment of pediatric CNS tumors, including single cell or single nucleus RNA sequencing of CD45-sorted cell fractions, coupled with digital spatial profiling (DSP) evaluation of the immune cell components as identified by CD45 fluorescent antibody stained regions using the Nanostring GeoMX platform. My lecture will focus on the technical details of these platforms and our results, including exploring the concordance across platforms and the synergies therein.
