Back

Cancer-immune coevolution dictated by antigenic mutation accumulation

Wang, L.; Morison, C.; Huang, W.

2024-09-11 evolutionary biology
10.1101/2024.09.10.612074 bioRxiv
Show abstract

The immune system is one of the first lines of defence against cancer. When effector cells attempt to suppress tumour, cancer cells can evolve methods of escape or inhibition. Knowledge of this coevolutionary system can help to understand tumour-immune dynamics both during tumorigenesis and during immunotherapy treatments. Here, we present an individual-based model of mutation accumulation, where random mutations in cancer cells trigger specialised immune responses. Unlike previous research, we explicitly model interactions between cancer and effector cells and incorporate stochastic effects, which are important for the expansion and extinction of small populations. We find that the parameters governing interactions between the cancer and effector cells induce different outcomes of tumour progress, such as suppression and evasion. While it is hard to measure the cancer-immune dynamics directly, genetic information of the cancer may indicate the presence of such interactions. Our model demonstrates signatures of selection in sequencing-derived summary statistics, such as the single-cell mutational burden distribution. Thus, bulk and single-cell sequencing may provide information about the coevolutionary dynamics.

Matching journals

The top 6 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.