Cell Res . . . The team at Sun Yat-sen University, Ma Jun, revealed the potential regulatory factors of immune cell diversity and immune subtypes associated with the prognosis of nasopharyngeal cancer.

Inature nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is an aggressive malignant tumor with extremely uneven ethnic and geographical distribution.more and more evidences show that targeted tumor microenvironment (TME) represents a promising therapeutic method in NPC, which highlights the urgent need to deepen the understanding of TME in complex NPC.on July 20, 2020, Ma Jun team of Sun Yat sen University published an online publication entitled "single cell transcriptomics reforms regulators underlying immune cell diversity and immune subtypes associated with diagnosis in nasopharyngeal" In this study, 7581 malignant cells and 40285 immune cells were generated from 15 cases of primary NPC tumors and 1 normal sample.this study reveals the malignant characteristics of capturing intratumoral transcriptional heterogeneity and predicting the invasiveness of malignant cells.a variety of immune cell subtypes were identified, including new subtypes, such as clec9a + dendritic cells (DC).to sum up, the findings of this study represent a unique resource, which can provide insight into the cellular heterogeneity of NPC TME, highlight potential biomarkers of anticancer therapy and risk stratification, and lay a new foundation for precise therapy of NPC.nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is a unique subtype of head and neck cancer.in terms of etiology, nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is highly associated with EBV infection, and has the characteristics of massive infiltration of immune cells around and inside the tumor.lesions suggest that there is a very complex tumor microenvironment (TME) in nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC).these specific functions of tumor microenvironment (TME) indicate the potential benefits of immunotherapy in nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC).indeed, inhibition of the immune checkpoint axis programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1) / PD ligand 1 (PD-L1) has gained clinical benefits in patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC).however, the response rate of patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) to PD-1 treatment is only 20% - 30%.this highlights the need for a deeper understanding of TME in NPC to identify therapeutic targets and reliable biomarkers for risk stratification.however, the current strategy for genome / transcriptomics analysis of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is mainly based on a large number of samples from these often small tumors, so these methods lack the resolution and accuracy to describe the complex heterogeneity of TME.this study generated a single cell transcriptome profile of 7581 malignant cells and 40285 immune cells from 15 cases of primary NPC tumors and 1 normal sample.this study reveals the malignant characteristics of capturing intratumoral transcriptional heterogeneity and predicting the invasiveness of malignant cells.a variety of immune cell subtypes were identified, including new subtypes, such as clec9a + dendritic cells (DC).this study further revealed the potential transcriptional regulatory factors of immune cell diversity, and the analysis of cell-to-cell interaction highlighted the promising immunotherapeutic targets in NPC.in addition, this study established specific characteristics of immune subtypes and demonstrated that the characteristics of macrophages, plasma cell like dendritic cells (pDCs), clec9a + DC, natural killer (NK) cells and plasma cells were significantly associated with the improvement of NPC survival.to sum up, the findings of this study represent a unique resource, which can provide insight into the cellular heterogeneity of NPC TME, highlight potential biomarkers of anticancer therapy and risk stratification, and lay a new foundation for precise therapy of NPC.for reference: ා auth Jun Ma