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The murine Microenvironment Cell Population counter method to estimate abundance of tissue-infiltrating immune and
Florent Petitprez1,2,3, Sacha Levy4, Cheng-Ming Sun4
1Centre de Recherche des Cordeliers, INSERM, Sorbonne Université, Université de Paris, Team Inflammation, Complement and Cancer, F-75006, Paris, France. florent.petitprez@ligue-cancer.net.
Insights
Researchers developed a new method, murine Microenvironment Cell Population counter (mMCP-counter), to precisely quantify 16 cell types in mouse tissues using transcriptomic data. This tool aids disease research and predicts treatment responses.
Area of Science:
- Immunology
- Computational Biology
- Translational Medicine
Background:
- Quantifying immune and stromal cells in tissues is crucial for understanding disease mechanisms and treatment efficacy.
- Existing transcriptomic methods for cell quantification are limited, especially for mouse models.
Purpose of the Study:
- To develop and validate a novel computational method for accurate quantification of murine immune and stromal cell populations from transcriptomic data.
- To assess the utility of the new method in predicting treatment response and identifying disease-specific immune changes.
Main Methods:
- Development of the murine Microenvironment Cell Population counter (mMCP-counter) using highly specific transcriptomic markers.
- Validation of mMCP-counter against flow cytometry data.
- Application of mMCP-counter to analyze transcriptomic data from cancer and Alzheimer's disease mouse models.
Main Results:
- mMCP-counter accurately quantifies 16 distinct immune and stromal cell populations in mouse tissues.
- The method demonstrates superior performance compared to existing approaches.
- mMCP-counter scores predict response to immune checkpoint blockade in cancer models.
- mMCP-counter identifies early immune alterations associated with Alzheimer's disease.
Conclusions:
- mMCP-counter is a validated and accurate tool for quantifying cellular composition in mouse tissues using transcriptomics.
- This method has significant potential for advancing research in immunology, cancer, and neurodegenerative diseases.
- mMCP-counter provides valuable insights into disease pathogenesis and therapeutic responses in preclinical models.
Abstract:
Quantifying tissue-infiltrating immune and stromal cells provides clinically relevant information for various diseases. While numerous methods can quantify immune or stromal cells in human tissue samples from transcriptomic data, few are available for mouse studies. We introduce murine Microenvironment Cell Population counter (mMCP-counter), a method based on highly specific transcriptomic markers that accurately quantify 16 immune and stromal murine cell populations. We validated mMCP-counter with flow cytometry data and showed that mMCP-counter outperforms existing methods. We showed that mMCP-counter scores are predictive of response to immune checkpoint blockade in cancer mouse models and identify early immune impacts of Alzheimer's disease.
