Tunable PhenoCycler Imaging of the Murine Pre-Clinical Tumour Microenvironments

Abstract

The tumour microenvironment (TME) consists of tumour-supportive immune cells, endothelial cells, and fibroblasts. PhenoCycler, a high-plex single cell imaging platform, is used to characterize the complexity of the TME. Here, we used PhenoCycler to spatially resolve the TME of 8 routinely employed pre-clinical models of lymphoma, breast cancer, and melanoma. Our data reveal distinct TMEs in the different cancer models that were imaged, and show that cell-cell contacts differ depending on the tumour type examined. For instance, we found that the immune infiltration in a murine model of melanoma is altered in cellular organization in melanomas that become resistant to PD-1 therapy, with depletions in a number of cell-cell interactions. Furthermore, we provide detailed pipelines for the conjugation of antibodies that are optimized for PhenoCycler staining of murine FFPE tissues specifically, alongside open-source data analysis procedures. Overall, this is a valuable resource study seamlessly adaptable to any field of research involving murine models.