Yubin Xie, PhD

Yubin Xie, PhD

Machine learning scientist

Posts by Collection

portfolio

publications

Regenerative lineages and immune-mediated pruning in lung cancer metastasis

Published in Nature Medicine, 2020

Developmental processes underlying normal tissue regeneration have been implicated in cancer, but the degree of their enactment during tumor progression and under the selective pressures of immune surveillance, remain unknown. Here we show that human primary lung adenocarcinomas are characterized by the emergence of regenerative cell types, typically seen in response to lung injury, and by striking infidelity among transcription factors specifying most alveolar and bronchial epithelial lineages. In contrast, metastases are enriched for key endoderm and lung-specifying transcription factors, SOX2 and SOX9, and recapitulate more primitive transcriptional programs spanning stem-like to regenerative pulmonary epithelial progenitor states. This developmental continuum mirrors the progressive stages of spontaneous outbreak from metastatic dormancy in a mouse model and exhibits SOX9-dependent resistance to natural killer cells. Loss of developmental stage-specific constraint in macrometastases triggered by natural killer cell depletion suggests a dynamic interplay between developmental plasticity and immune-mediated pruning during metastasis.

Recommended citation: Laughney, A.M., Hu, J., Campbell, N.R. et al. Regenerative lineages and immune-mediated pruning in lung cancer metastasis. Nat Med 26, 259–269 (2020). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-019-0750-6

The human tumor atlas network: charting tumor transitions across space and time at single-cell resolution

Published in Cell, 2020

Crucial transitions in cancer—including tumor initiation, local expansion, metastasis, and therapeutic resistance—involve complex interactions between cells within the dynamic tumor ecosystem. Transformative single-cell genomics technologies and spatial multiplex in situ methods now provide an opportunity to interrogate this complexity at unprecedented resolution. The Human Tumor Atlas Network (HTAN), part of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Cancer Moonshot Initiative, will establish a clinical, experimental, computational, and organizational framework to generate informative and accessible three-dimensional atlases of cancer transitions for a diverse set of tumor types. This effort complements both ongoing efforts to map healthy organs and previous large-scale cancer genomics approaches focused on bulk sequencing at a single point in time. Generating single-cell, multiparametric, longitudinal atlases and integrating them with clinical outcomes should help identify novel predictive biomarkers and features as well as therapeutically relevant cell types, cell states, and cellular interactions across transitions. The resulting tumor atlases should have a profound impact on our understanding of cancer biology and have the potential to improve cancer detection, prevention, and therapeutic discovery for better precision-medicine treatments of cancer patients and those at risk for cancer.

Recommended citation: Rozenblatt-Rosen, Orit, et al. “The Human Tumor Atlas Network: Charting Tumor Transitions across Space and Time at Single-Cell Resolution.” Cell, Cell Press, 16 Apr. 2020 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867420303469

Signatures of plasticity, metastasis, and immunosuppression in an atlas of human small cell lung cancer

Published in Cancer Cell, 2021

Small cell lung cancer (SCLC) is an aggressive malignancy that includes subtypes defined by differential expression of ASCL1, NEUROD1, and POU2F3 (SCLC-A, -N, and -P, respectively). To define the heterogeneity of tumors and their associated microenvironments across subtypes, we sequenced 155,098 transcriptomes from 21 human biospecimens, including 54,523 SCLC transcriptomes. We observe greater tumor diversity in SCLC than lung adenocarcinoma, driven by canonical, intermediate, and admixed subtypes. We discover a PLCG2-high SCLC phenotype with stem-like, pro-metastatic features that recurs across subtypes and predicts worse overall survival. SCLC exhibits greater immune sequestration and less immune infiltration than lung adenocarcinoma, and SCLC-N shows less immune infiltrate and greater T cell dysfunction than SCLC-A. We identify a profibrotic, immunosuppressive monocyte/macrophage population in SCLC tumors that is particularly associated with the recurrent, PLCG2-high subpopulation.

Recommended citation: Chan, Joseph M., Álvaro Quintanal-Villalonga, Vianne Ran Gao, Yubin Xie, Viola Allaj, Ojasvi Chaudhary, and Ignas Masilionis et al. 2022. "Signatures Of Plasticity, Metastasis, And Immunosuppression In An Atlas Of Human Small Cell Lung Cancer". https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1535610821004979

talks

teaching

Teaching experience 1

Undergraduate course, University 1, Department, 2014

This is a description of a teaching experience. You can use markdown like any other post.

Teaching experience 2

Workshop, University 1, Department, 2015

This is a description of a teaching experience. You can use markdown like any other post.