Crosstalk between tumor and microenvironment: Insights from spatial transcriptomics

Abstract

Cancer is a dynamic disease, and clonal heterogeneity plays a fundamental role in tumor development, progression, and resistance to therapies. Single-cell and spatial multimodal technologies can provide a high-resolution molecular map of underlying genomic, epigenomic, and transcriptomic alterations involved in inter- and intra-tumor heterogeneity and interactions with the microenvironment. In this review, we provide a perspective on factors driving cancer heterogeneity, tumor evolution, and clonal states. We briefly describe spatial transcriptomic technologies and summarize recent literature that sheds light on the dynamical interactions between tumor states, cell-to-cell communication, and remodeling local microenvironment.

Keywords: Cancer evolution; Cell–cell communication; Single-cell transcriptomics; Spatial transcriptomics; Tumor evolution; Tumor microenvironment.