Bioinformatics Seminar
Time: 11AM
Venue: Zoom Webinar
21 September 2021
Using single cell RNA-seq data to better understand drug treatment in triple negative breast cancer
Jianan WangWEHI Bioinformatics
Ipatasertib is an oral medicine targeting the Akt signalling pathway, which, when blocked will inhibit cancer cell growth and proliferation. Although clinical trials showed that ipatasertib significantly reduced the risk of tumour progression and death, the influence of ipatasertib on immune cells against cancer remains unknown. We performed single-cell RNA-seq analysis on 2,933 CD8+ T cells from 6 samples with triple negative breast cancer (TNBC), including 3 ipatasertib treated mice and 3 vehicle treated mice. We demonstrate that the drug treated samples have an increased number of stem-like CD8+ T cells with high expression levels of the TCF7 gene. Stem-like memory phenotype markers were associated with drug treated mice, while markers relevant to exhaustion were more highly expressed in vehicle treated mice. Our data suggested that stem-like memory CD8+ T cells (TSCM) are the target cell population for ipatasertib. Further investigation of TSCM cell population is likely to contribute to better immunotherapy in TNBC.