Systems Level Analysis of Ovarian Cancer by CyTOF® Reveals NK Cells with an Unexpected Phenotype

Join Professor Wendy Fantl (Stanford University) as she describes her team’s latest research results on ovarian cancer intra-tumoral heterogeneity and how they identified a novel NK cell subset (decidual-like) that ovarian tumor cells manipulate to suppress cytotoxicity.

Prof. Fantl highlights the critical role of CD9 in ovarian cancer, describing how CD9 is transferred from ovarian tumor cells to NK cells to suppress their activity.     

Webinar objectives:

  • Learn about ovarian cancer cell biology and single cell multiplex technologies
  • Explore intra-tumoral heterogeneity and immune-tumor cell associations using mass cytometry
  • Discover novel mechanisms by which ovarian cancer cells suppress NK cell cytotoxicity 


About the presenter:

Wendy J. Fantl Ph. D is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Urology at Stanford University Medical School. Prior to Stanford, Dr Fantl spent over a decade in the Biotech arena at Chrion and Nodality. At Stanford, she leads a laboratory program that studies ovarian and kidney cancer to address their areas of unmet clinical need. Specifically, her lab addresses two key questions related to drug resistance and immunotherapy. Firstly, why do most ovarian cancer patients initially respond to chemotherapy but eventually experience relapse and chemotherapy-resistant disease? The second question asks why some malignancies respond to immunotherapy whereas others do not. To fulfill these goals, she applies multi-parametric single-cell proteomic technologies (mass cytometry aka Cytometry by Time Of Flight (CyTOF®) and CODetection by indEXing (CODEX) imaging) combined with specialized computational approaches for analyzing single-cell datasets. These technologies reveal cell heterogeneity identifying minority cell subpopulations of interest, such as those with roles in metastasis and therapeutic resistance, that would elude bulk analyses. This year (2021) she published a major mass cytometry study of ovarian tumors that demonstrated the presence of intra-tumoral decidual-like natural killer cells that correlate with tumor expansion. 


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