Back

Spatial determinants of tumor cell dedifferentiation and plasticity in primary cutaneous melanoma

Vallius, T.; Shi, Y.; Novikov, E.; Pant, S. M.; Pelletier, R.; Chen, Y.-A.; Tefft, J. B.; Nirmal, A. J.; Maliga, Z.; Wan, G.; Murphy, G.; Santagata, S.; Semenov, Y.; Liu, D.; Lian, C. G.; Sorger, P. K.

2025-06-24 cancer biology
10.1101/2025.06.21.660851 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Localized cutaneous melanoma can be cured by excision but success critically depends on early detection and risk assessment of primary lesions. However, their initiation, progression, and immunology remain poorly understood, partly due to high intra- and inter-tumor heterogeneity. We studied this heterogeneity using spatial profiling in over 300 histological domains, each representing a single progression stage, and found that 200-600 cell neighborhoods from a single melanoma can be as different in RNA and protein expression as neighborhoods from different tumors. These differences are not stochastic, however, and disease progression can be mapped at the neighborhood level onto a cell state landscape defined by the activity of the melanocyte master regulator MITF and genes associated with a dedifferentiated neural crest phenotype. Position in this landscape is influenced by proximity to immune cells, perivascular environments, and other tissue features, but no single association is absolute, giving rise to complex spatial patterns.

Matching journals

The top 5 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.