2026 AACR Annual Meeting

Session Title: 3D Tissue Imaging and Cancer

Sorger Presentation: High-plex 3D imaging to dissect mechanisms of immunosurveillance in immunosuppression in human tumors

Abstract

Histopathological inspection of biopsies and resection specimens remains the dominant diagnostic modality for most solid tumors and is universally performed on thin slices of tissue. High-plex spatial profiling has adopted this format even through it fragments cells and fails to capture the true geometry of multi-cellular assemblies. This session will describe recent advances in the collection and analysis of 3D data using a variety of modalities including spatial transcriptomics, high-plex imaging, and traditional H&E stains. Biological insights derived from 3D analysis will be discussed, as will means of using 3D data to inform the interpretation of much more numerous 2D data. In this we will explore exciting advances in AI and instrumentation, while being mindful that pathologists have long had an implicitly 3D perspective based on focusing up and down through single tissue sections (during "high power" imaging) and examination of data from multiple sections per tissue block. 

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