Histotripsy-initiated immune response in a neuroblastoma murine model

High-risk neuroblastoma (NB) is a pediatric malignancy associated with metastases and an immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment. Standard-of-care treatments like chemotherapy are often ineffective, which motivates the investigation of adjuvant approaches. Histotripsy is a noninvasive focused ultrasound therapy that ablates tissue through the mechanical action of bubble clouds. In addition to disruption of the targeted tumor, non-targeted lesions exhibit growth delay after the histotripsy procedure. The primary hypothesis of this study was histotripsy-induced shifts in the tumor microenvironment will improve the response of metastatic NB to chemotherapy. Overall design: The goal of this data set is to evaluation of local and systemic immunological effects of histotripsy. For the immune response experiments, randomization within blocks was used to assign tumors to one of three groups: 1) untreated, 2) histotripsy, or 3) contralateral (the untreated tumor within a treated mouse). Within each group, a subgroup of mice was monitored for tumor growth until terminal endpoint criteria were met. For the other subgroup, animals were sacrificed 5-7 days post-treatment and tumor samples analyzed with flow cytometry, immunohistochemistry, single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq).