Identifying tissue states by spatial protein patterns related to chemotherapy response in triple-negative breast cancer

Abstract

Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is an aggressive malignancy with limited targeted therapies and variable responses to conventional chemotherapy, influenced by intratumoral heterogeneity and complex tumor microenvironment (TME) interactions. Understanding spatiotemporal cellular interplay and tissue organization is crucial for advancing tumor biology and improving patient stratification. Spatially resolved proteomics, such as Imaging Mass Cytometry (IMC), offers a powerful approach to dissect the TME. We present an end-to-end computational pipeline for robust quantitative analysis of large-scale IMC datasets, addressing the challenge of batch effects through image-level contrast adjustment. Applying this framework to 813 tissue regions encompassing over 4 million cells from 63 TNBC patients, we revealed distinct spatial arrangements of cell types between chemotherapy responders and non-responders. Non-responders showed reduced cytotoxic T-cell infiltration into tumor regions and increased spatial co-localization between fibroblasts and macrophages, a pattern that persisted and intensified after chemotherapy treatment. To integrate these complex spatial-molecular relationships, we used graph neural networks (GNNs) to predict treatment response from pre-treatment samples with AUROC=0.71. Interpretability analysis identified B7H4, CD11b, CD366, and FOXP3 as the most predictive protein markers, with fibroblasts, cancer cells, and CD8+ T cells being the most informative cell types. This study introduces a scalable analytical framework for spatial proteomics with interpretable predictions, suggesting features of tissue state that could guide treatment decisions in TNBC and further our understanding of the spatial determinants of therapeutic response.