Comprehensive evaluation of transcriptome-based cell-type quantification methods for immuno-oncology

Gregor Sturm, Francesca Finotello, Florent Petitprez, Jitao David Zhang, Jan Baumbach, Wolf H. Fridman, Markus List, Tatsiana Aneichyk

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

517 Scopus citations

Abstract

Motivation: The composition and density of immune cells in the tumor microenvironment (TME) profoundly influence tumor progression and success of anti-cancer therapies. Flow cytometry, immunohistochemistry staining or single-cell sequencing are often unavailable such that we rely on computational methods to estimate the immune-cell composition from bulk RNA-sequencing (RNA-seq) data. Various methods have been proposed recently, yet their capabilities and limitations have not been evaluated systematically. A general guideline leading the research community through cell type deconvolution is missing. Results: We developed a systematic approach for benchmarking such computational methods and assessed the accuracy of tools at estimating nine different immune- and stromal cells from bulk RNA-seq samples. We used a single-cell RNA-seq dataset of ∼11 000 cells from the TME to simulate bulk samples of known cell type proportions, and validated the results using independent, publicly available gold-standard estimates. This allowed us to analyze and condense the results of more than a hundred thousand predictions to provide an exhaustive evaluation across seven computational methods over nine cell types and ∼1800 samples from five simulated and real-world datasets. We demonstrate that computational deconvolution performs at high accuracy for well-defined cell-type signatures and propose how fuzzy cell-type signatures can be improved. We suggest that future efforts should be dedicated to refining cell population definitions and finding reliable signatures.

Original languageEnglish
Article numberbtz363
Pages (from-to)i436-i445
JournalBioinformatics
Volume35
Issue number14
DOIs
StatePublished - 15 Jul 2019

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