Cancers
A Lymphoid-Enriched Spatial Immune Niche Defines an Immunotherapy-Responsive State in Hepatocellular Carcinoma
By Meng Cai, Ke Hu, Haichang Wang and 10 others.
Abstract
Background
Atezolizumab plus bevacizumab is a first-line therapy for advanced hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), yet only a subset of patients achieve durable benefit. The spatial organization of the tumour microenvironment (TME) and its relationship to immunotherapy response remain incompletely understood.
Methods
We integrated single-cell transcriptomics, spatial transcriptomics, spatial proteomics, and bulk RNA-sequencing cohorts to characterize spatially organized immune ecosystems associated with immunotherapy response in HCC. Single-cell RNA sequencing from 100 HCC samples was used to construct a cellular reference, which was integrated with spatial transcriptomics from 12 sections to identify nine consensus spatial niches.