6 Nov 2020
Meromit Singer
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and
Harvard Medical School
The introduction of single-cell high-throughput measurement technologies (such as single-cell RNA-seq) have recently transformed the breadth and depth at which the immune component within tissues can be characterized and studied. Specifically, the ability to characterize heterogeneity of cellular states within tissues and the changes that occur following disease or therapeutic intervention are enabling the formation of novel prognostic tools as well as hypotheses regarding cellular function. Excitingly, the recent ability to generate coupled RNA-seq and T cell or B cell receptor data at single-cell resolution and at high-throughput (using 10X technology) has enabled exploring relationships between cellular states and clonal distributions within and across tissues.
In this talk we will discuss how coupling of single-cell RNA-seq and TCR annotation can be used to study systemic aspects of T cell immunology during cancer and autoimmune disease. We will discuss ongoing works in which we assess the extent to which peripheral blood can be used for tracking a host response to tumor by characterization of the CD8+ T cell tumor-directed component in blood, and touch on a project characterizing Th17 T cell heterogeneity and migration during homeostasis and Experimental Autoimmune Encephalomyelitis disease in mouse models. We will explain how COMET, a computational tool developed by the Singer group to identify marker panels for cell populations of interest from single-cell RNA-seq data, was useful in both of the presented works.