REVIEW article
Front. Immunol.
Sec. Cancer Immunity and Immunotherapy
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2025.1554114
This article is part of the Research TopicApproaches to Illustrate the Tumor Immune MicroenvironmentView all 9 articles
The Tumor Microenvironment Across Four Dimensions: Assessing Space and Time in Cancer Biology
Provisionally accepted
- University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, United States
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The tumor microenvironment is heterogeneous, structurally complex, and continually evolving, making it difficult to fully capture. Common dissociative techniques thoroughly characterize the heterogeneity of cellular populations but lack structural context. The recent boom in spatial analyses has exponentially accelerated our understanding of the structural complexity of these cellular populations. However, to understand the dynamics of cancer pathogenesis, we must assess this heterogeneity across space and time. In this review, we provide an overview of current dissociative, spatial, and temporal analysis strategies in addition to existing and prospective spatiotemporal techniques to illustrate how understanding the tumor microenvironment, focusing on dynamic immune-cancer cell interactions, across four dimensions will advance cancer research and its diagnostic and therapeutic applications.
Keywords: spatial omics, Temporal analysis, Tumor Microenvironment, Tumor immune microenvironment, tumor evolution, spatiotemporal, intravital imaging
Received: 01 Jan 2025; Accepted: 03 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Carstens, Larson and Mandloi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Julienne Leigh Carstens, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, United States
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