Immune Cell Interactions in High-Grade Serous Ovarian Cancer Tumours
Date
2025
Authors
Lemaire, Kelly
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University Of Victoria
Abstract
High-grade serous ovarian cancer (HGSOC) has had persistently poor long-term survival rates. Prior research has largely focused on individual immune cell types, so understanding their interactions may offer novel insights into tumor biology and patient outcomes. This study analyzed immune cell interactions in the tumor microenvironment using a dataset of 1,078 patients and 1,995 tissue microarray (TMA) cores from the Canadian Ovarian Experimental Unified Resource (COEUR) cohort. Poisson log-linear models were employed to evaluate immune cell triplet associations, while spatial relationships were examined using the cross-K function.
Findings indicate that most immune cell pairs and triplets exhibit associations at the TMA core level. However, preliminary spatial analysis suggests that many of these associations do not persist when accounting for spatial distribution. Future work will expand spatial analysis across all immune cell pairs, conduct survival analysis to determine the prognostic significance of spatially associated immune cells, and validate findings in an external cohort. This research aims to enhance the understanding of immune interactions in HGSOC and potentially inform new therapeutic strategies.
Description
Keywords
high-grade serous ovarian cancer, tumour microenvironment, immune cell interactions