Gregory E Verghese

The paper identifies extrafollicular plasma cells as an antibody-independent checkpoint that inhibits dendritic cell-T-cell priming in tumor-draining lymph nodes, leading to poor prognosis and immune-checkpoint resistance.

CNN patch classifiers trained only on normal breast H&E slides label epithelium, stroma and adipocytes with AUCs of 0.98–1.00 on three external cohorts and feed a lobule-detection pipeline.

The paper introduces SMART, a spatio-molecular atlas of TNBC response trajectories, revealing distinct epithelial archetypes and tumor-immune microenvironments associated with treatment response and prognosis.