Explainable Machine Learning Reveals the Role of the Breast Tumor Microenvironment in Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy Outcome

Recent advancements in single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) have enabled the identification of phenotypic diversity within breast tumor tissues. However, the contribution of these cell phenotypes to tumor biology and treatment response has remained less understood. This is primarily due to the limited number of available samples and the inherent heterogeneity of breast tumors. To address this limitation, we leverage a state-of-the-art scRNA-seq atlas and employ CIBER-SORTx to estimate cell phenotype fractions by de-convolving bulk expression profiles in more than 2000 samples from patients who have undergone Neoad-juvant Chemotherapy (NAC). We introduce a pipeline based on explainable Machine Learning (XML) to robustly explore the associations between different cell phenotype fractions and the response to NAC in the general population as well as different subtypes of breast tumors. By comparing tumor subtypes, we observe that multiple cell types exhibit a distinct association with pCR within each subtype. Specifically, Dendritic cells (DCs) exhibit a negative association with pathological Complete Response (pCR) in Estrogen Receptor positive, ER+, (Luminal A/B) tumors, while showing a positive association with pCR in ER-(Basal-like/HER2-enriched) tumors. Analysis of new spatial cyclic immunoflu-orescence data and publicly available imaging mass cytometry data showed significant differences in the spatial distribution of DCs between ER subtypes. These variations underscore disparities in the engagement of DCs within the tumor microenvironment (TME), potentially driving their divergent associations with pCR across tumor subtypes. Overall, our findings on 28 different cell types provide a comprehensive understanding of the role played by cellular compo-nents of the TME in NAC outcomes. They also highlight directions for further experimental investigations at a mechanistic level.