Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 817

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 121 of the 121 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

A pan-cancer blueprint of the heterogeneous tumor microenvironment revealed by single-cell profiling

Open access
Qian, Junbin, Olbrecht, Siel, Boeckx, Bram, Vos, Hanne, Laoui, Damya, Etlioglu, Emre, Wauters, Els, Pomella, Valentina, Verbandt, Sara, Busschaert, Pieter, Bassez, Ayse, Franken, Amelie, Bempt, Marlies Vanden, Xiong, Jieyi, Weynand, Birgit, van Herck, Yannick, Antoranz, Asier, Bosisio, Francesca Maria, Thienpont, Bernard, Floris, Giuseppe, Vergote, Ignace, Smeets, Ann, Tejpar, Sabine, Lambrechts, Diether·2020·Cell Research

Abstract

The stromal compartment of the tumor microenvironment consists of a heterogeneous set of tissue-resident and tumor-infiltrating cells, which are profoundly moulded by cancer cells. An outstanding question is to what extent this heterogeneity is similar between cancers affecting different organs. Here, we profile 233,591 single cells from patients with lung, colorectal, ovary and breast cancer (n = 36) and construct a pan-cancer blueprint of stromal cell heterogeneity using different single-cell RNA and protein-based technologies. We identify 68 stromal cell populations, of which 46 are shared between cancer types and 22 are unique. We also characterise each population phenotypically by highlighting its marker genes, transcription factors, metabolic activities and tissue-specific expression differences. Resident cell types are characterised by substantial tissue specificity, while tumor-infiltrating cell types are largely shared across cancer types. Finally, by applying the blueprint to melanoma tumors treated with checkpoint immunotherapy and identifying a naïve CD4+ T-cell phenotype predictive of response to checkpoint immunotherapy, we illustrate how it can serve as a guide to interpret scRNA-seq data. In conclusion, by providing a comprehensive blueprint through an interactive web server, we generate the first panoramic view on the shared complexity of stromal cells in different cancers.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1038/s41422-020-0355-0

Cites

121 of 121 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 121 references

Cited by

See all 817

Metadata

Authors
Qian, J., Olbrecht, S., Boeckx, B., Vos, H., Laoui, D., Etlioglu, E., Wauters, E., Pomella, V., Verbandt, S., Busschaert, P., Bassez, A., Franken, A., Bempt, M. V., Xiong, J., Weynand, B., van Herck, Y., Antoranz, A., Bosisio, F. M., Thienpont, B., Floris, G., Vergote, I., Smeets, A., Tejpar, S., & Lambrechts, D.
Venue
Cell Research
Published
2020-06-19
Volume
30
Issue
9
Pages
745-762
ISSN
  • 1001-0602 (ISSN-L)
  • 1748-7838
OpenAlex
W3036843909
Cited by
817
References
121
FWCI
26.14
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
bronze

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: A pan-cancer blueprint of the heterogeneous tumor microenvironment revealed by single-cell profiling. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1038/s41422-020-0355-0
The paper
Qian, J., Olbrecht, S., Boeckx, B., Vos, H., Laoui, D., Etlioglu, E., Wauters, E., Pomella, V., Verbandt, S., Busschaert, P., Bassez, A., Franken, A., Bempt, M. V., Xiong, J., Weynand, B., van Herck, Y., Antoranz, A., Bosisio, F. M., Thienpont, B., . . . Lambrechts, D. (2020). A pan-cancer blueprint of the heterogeneous tumor microenvironment revealed by single-cell profiling. Cell Research. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41422-020-0355-0

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.