People's Daily Health Client Reporter Chen Linhui
"The heterogeneity of the immune microenvironment is one of the important reasons for drug resistance, recurrence and poor prognosis in tumor patients. In recent years, immunotherapy and combination treatment have brought hope to patients with advanced tumors." On November 11, Professor Yang Yinmo , the dean of Peking University First Hospital and expert on hepatobiliary and pancreatic tumors, said in an interview with the People's Daily Health Client Reporter.
On November 9, the team of Professor Zhang Ning , Director of the Oncology Translation Research Center of Peking University First Hospital, collaborated with the Peking University Frontier Innovation Center for Biomedical Frontier Innovation Center Zhang Zemin , and the Department of Hepatobiliary Surgery of Peking University People's Hospital Zhu Jiye , to publish a research paper in the journal Nature. At the single-cell level, revealed the heterogeneity characteristics and five subtypes of the immune microenvironment of liver cancer, and discovered the molecular mechanism of neutrophils promoting cancer, providing an important theoretical basis for the development of new cancer treatment methods.
Professor Zhang Ning's team member Kong Ruirui (left), Xue Ruidong (middle), Cao Qi (right) is working. Photo provided by the respondent
According to data from the World Health Organization International Cancer Research Institute (IRAC), a total of 905,000 new liver cancer patients were added in 2020, of which 410,000 were from China, accounting for 45.3% of the global cases.
" system explores the heterogeneity of tumor immune microenvironment and has an important guiding role in treatment selection, efficacy prediction, program optimization and development of new immunotherapy targets. " Professor Zhang Ning introduced that in treating cancer, cancer cells can be directly killed through surgical resection, radiation therapy, chemotherapy, targeted therapy and other methods, or the " microenvironment and " on which cancer cells rely on, that is, by stimulating the patient's own immune system to fight cancer.
"The immune microenvironment of cancer cells in each patient is different. To achieve accurate immunomodulatory treatment, it is necessary to figure out how many types of cancer's immune microenvironment can be divided into. Therefore, the research on the immune microenvironment of tumors is an important research direction." Professor Zhang Ning said that in recent years, the team has been focusing on the exploration of liver cancer heterogeneity, and a series of preliminary work has revealed the genome, phenotype and single-cell copy number heterogeneity of liver cancer.
This latest study, , first , defines five immune microenvironment subtypes of liver cancer in single-cell accuracy, explores its cell composition, spatial distribution, genomic characteristics and chemokine receptor-ligand network, , for the first time, , fully reveals the heterogeneity of tumor-related neutrophils, and discovers and verifies the tumor-promoting mechanisms of two key subpopulations CCL4+ and PD-L1+ TAN. Finally, by constructing a transgenic mouse liver cancer model, it is gradually and deeply proved that targeting tumor-related neutrophils is expected to form a new liver cancer immunotherapy plan. These achievements provide key information for basic research and clinical diagnosis and treatment of liver cancer.
"This study has achieved single-cell analysis in the field of liver cancer for the first time. Such a large-scale data volume has enabled us to define the immune microenvironment typing of liver cancer and the heterogeneity of neutrophils in a single-cell accuracy system for the first time, which is of great significance to the precise immune diagnosis and treatment of liver cancer." Professor Zhang Zemin told the People's Daily Health Client reporter.
Based on the data obtained from the experiment, Professor Zhang Ning's team proposed, "The intervention of tumor-related neutrophils is expected to significantly increase the number of patients with effective immune checkpoint treatment. These achievements provide new ideas for basic research and clinical diagnosis and treatment of liver cancer and even solid tumors of ."
"As a clinician, what I am most interested in is to treat diseases and save people. We will continue to work hard to further push the new discoveries of this cooperation into clinical diagnosis and treatment, so that patients with liver cancer can truly benefit." Professor Zhu Jiye said in an interview with a reporter from the People's Daily Health Client.
