A well-established principle in developmental biology is that cellular context governs cell fate, differentiation, proliferation and survival. There is substantial evidence that solid tumours are also complex cellular systems, or ecosystems, in which interactions between neoplastic, stromal and immune cells govern the natural history of disease and response to treatment. However, technical and conceptual limitations have led to shallow insights into tumour ecosystems and limited the development of next generation cancer drugs.
In this presentation I will describe my lab’s work to map human solid tumour ecosystems using single cell and spatially-resolved methods and to integrate these with conventional genomic classifiers of disease. From these studies comes the discovery of novel cell types and states; new methods to stratify disease into biologic and risk categories; insights into tissue organisation and ecosystem-directed therapeutic strategies.