About this Research Topic
How are cells organized in time and space? How do infectious agents or cancer reprogram cellular and subcellular organization within tissue to drive disease? The recent advent of high-dimensional technologies capable of profiling spatial interactions at the single-cell level have dramatically improved our understanding of the architecture of immune responses in cancer and viral infections. Characterizing the coordinated cell-to-cell interactions that underlie the aggressiveness of disease, clinical response to immunotherapies, engineered T cell therapies, vaccines, and infectious agents are key to our understanding the immune responses in time and space, and how they can be harnessed effectively against cancer and pathogens.
Conventional means of studying cellular and tissue responses to disease are often limited to the population level, and involve taking individual cells out of their spatial context. The recently developed “spatial-omics” methodologies have greatly expanded upon conventional transcriptional and proteomic approaches in experimental tissue imaging, enabling the quantitative study of malignant and infected cells in their native tissue context. This Research Topic aims to collate a compilation of leading-edge manuscripts on 1) New technologies that enable high-dimensional, quantitative spatial profiling of tissues and/or 2) Novel analytical tools for interrogating datasets of spatial information to glean new insights into cancer biology, viral infections and immunotherapies.
This Research Topic aims to share advances in spatial biology by hosting research articles, reviews, perspectives, novel hypotheses, and case studies related to:
• Cancer Immunology and Immunotherapy
• Viral Immunology
• Tissue Architecture in Health and Disease
• Novel Spatial Technologies
• Novel Computational Approaches In Spatial Biology
Dr. Rodig’s laboratory has received research funding from Bristol-Myers-Squibb, Merck, Affimed, and KITE/Gilead, and Dr. Rodig is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board for Immunitas, Inc. The other Topic Editors declare no competing interests.
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
