SPEAKER_04

And then in some cases, the tumor creates a boundary, a barrier between itself and the immune system, where there might be certain kinds of cells that the immune system, the tumor has told the immune system, ignore us.

We're not here.

But what we now can do is, well, on the other side of when you look at, let's say, complex patient populations, you find these things called tertiary lymphoid structures.

So your body has 220 or so lymph nodes, okay?

And the lymph nodes are where the immune system makes decisions, let's say.

It turns out that in the middle of tumors,

The body has evolved a mechanism to create what essentially looks like a lymphoid structure in the middle of the tumor.

It's sort of a forward camp of immune cells that the more of those you see in a tumor, the better will be your outcome as a patient.

And so we used a cohort of colorectal cell, basically colon cancer patients, where we looked at hundreds of biopsies.

And we did that pseudotime analysis where we looked at

for mature tertiary lymphoid structures.

And then we looked for immature, slightly less mature, even more less mature, etc.

And we were able to backtrack to the cell types which need to come together that would then form the more mature.

What use is that?

It's a nice paper, but it also now tells us what we might do to create more of these in a tumor.

Because we already know from multiple kinds of tumor types now that the more of these tertiary lymphoid structures you have, the better off will be your outcome with chemotherapy.

So it might be, for instance, that once we know that you have a disease like this, we could give you some kind of therapy, a virus or what have you.

that goes and homes to the tumor, seeds the beginnings of these initiators with, there's these cytokines that are produced that are necessary for initiating the formation of these objects.

And so there's a huge benefit to that, but we never would have found those, in my lab at least, without the AI.

Because it basically did the work for us.