Scientists in China ＂portrait＂ the cells of 15 kinds of tumors.

　　Xinhua News Agency, Beijing, February 7 (Reporter Lin Miaomiao, Xia Ke) Different types of cancer have different cell compositions, which leads to different characteristics in the occurrence and development of tumors. Recently, scientists in China systematically described the characteristics of tumor infiltrating myeloid cells in 15 kinds of cancers, including gastric cancer, colorectal cancer, liver cancer, lung cancer and breast cancer, from the single cell level.

　　This research paper, which was co-operated by Ji Jiafu team of Peking University Cancer Hospital and Zhang Zemin research group of Peking University Biomedical Frontier Innovation Center, was recently published in the international academic journal Cell.

　　The research team compared the characteristics of myeloid cell groups such as mast cells, dendritic cells and tumor-associated macrophages in different cancer species, which provided an important basis for immunotherapy targeting myeloid cells in different cancer species.

　　According to reports, tumors have a complex ecosystem, and cancer cells form a complex cell regulatory network by interacting with many other types of cells. Among them, myeloid cells play an important role in regulating tumor inflammatory response and angiogenesis, so they have become another popular target cell in clinical research of cancer treatment after lymphocytes.

　　China is a country with high incidence of gastric cancer. Scientists have found that the proportion of mast cells in tumor tissues of gastric cancer is higher than that in normal tissues adjacent to cancer, indicating that the accumulation of mast cells in tumor tissues plays an important role in the occurrence and progress of gastric cancer. There are macrophage groups in gastric cancer tissues that up-regulate angiogenesis-related signal pathways, indicating that macrophage groups play an important role in gastric cancer tumor microenvironment.

　　By further integrating the single-cell transcriptome sequencing data produced by the team and published public data, the research team constructed the myeloid cell maps of 15 cancer species, including gastric cancer, and systematically compared the similarities and differences in composition, development and function of each myeloid cell group among different cancer species.

　　It is found that mast cells present different functional states in various cancer species, and there are macrophage groups that up-regulate the signal pathway related to angiogenesis in different types of cancer. Macrophages are highly heterogeneous in different cancer species, which means that it is especially necessary to consider their transcription specificity in different cancer species when carrying out immunotherapy for macrophages.