Role of metabolic crosstalk in determining immunity during tumor progression

The project addresses the challenge of studying immune cell metabolism and crosstalk in the tumor microenvironment (TME), where metabolic competition and symbiosis negatively impact immune cell function. It leverages a developed flux balance analysis (FBA) algorithm called Compass, applied to single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) data from a pre-clinical murine model of melanoma. Preliminary data indicate polyamine metabolism as a key hub of metabolic crosstalk. The work involves dissecting the functional role of polyamine metabolism in immune and tumor cells during tumor progression and constructing a high-resolution spatial map of tumor:immune metabolic crosstalk via the polyamine pathway.