Phenotyping EMT and Met Cellular States in Lung Cancer Patient Liquid Biopsies at a Personalized Level Using Mass Cytometry

Authors

Loukia G Karacosta
Danny Pancirer
Jordan S Preiss
Jalen A Benson
Winston Trope
Joseph B Shrager
Arthur Wai Sung
Joel W Neal
Sean C Bendall
Heather Wakelee
Sylvia K Plevritis

Publication Date

12-8-2023

Journal

Scientific Reports

Abstract

Malignant pleural effusions (MPEs) can be utilized as liquid biopsy for phenotyping malignant cells and for precision immunotherapy, yet MPEs are inadequately studied at the single-cell proteomic level. Here we leverage mass cytometry to interrogate immune and epithelial cellular profiles of primary tumors and pleural effusions (PEs) from early and late-stage non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients, with the goal of assessing epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) and mesenchymal-epithelial transition (MET) states in patient specimens. By using the EMT-MET reference map PHENOSTAMP, we observe a variety of EMT states in cytokeratin positive (CK+) cells, and report for the first time MET-enriched CK+ cells in MPEs. We show that these states may be relevant to disease stage and therapy response. Furthermore, we found that the fraction of CD33+ myeloid cells in PEs was positively correlated to the fraction of CK+ cells. Longitudinal analysis of MPEs drawn 2 months apart from a patient undergoing therapy, revealed that CK+ cells acquired heterogeneous EMT features during treatment. We present this work as a feasibility study that justifies deeper characterization of EMT and MET states in malignant cells found in PEs as a promising clinical platform to better evaluate disease progression and treatment response at a personalized level.

Keywords

Humans, Lung Neoplasms, Carcinoma, Non-Small-Cell Lung, Proteomics, Epithelial-Mesenchymal Transition, Pleural Effusion, Malignant, Pleural Effusion, Liquid Biopsy

Comments

Supplementary Materials

Data Availability Statement

PMID: 38065965