Identification and Characterization of Adrenergic and Mesenchymal Cancer Cell States in Neuroblastoma Using Spatial-Omics [RNA-Seq]

However, identification of MES neuroblastoma cells in patient tumors has been challenging and controversial. This may be due to inter- or intra-patient tumor heterogeneity or discrepancies between the established neuroblastoma cell lines and patient tumors.

To characterize the intra- and inter-patient cellular heterogeneity, we analyzed 54 neuroblastoma tumors, spanning a broad range of clinical, genetic, and histologic features. We combined single-cell/nucleus RNA-seq (sc/scRNA-seq), bulk RNA-seq, spatial transcriptomics, and spatial proteomics. We discovered that the tumor cells are in distinct cellular neighborhoods from the non-malignant immune and stromal cells, but we could not identify MES neuroblastoma cells using the established gene expression signatures developed from cell lines.