Stromal evolution of cancer-associated fibroblasts in PDAC GEMMs

With the advent of cancer immunotherapy, intense investigation has been focused on tumor-infiltrating immune cells. With only a fraction of patients responding to these new therapies, a better understanding of all elements of the tumor microenvironment (TME) that may influence therapeutic outcome is needed. Stromal elements of the TME, chiefly fibroblasts, have emerged as potential contributors to tumor progression and most recently resistance to immunotherapy, but their precise composition and clinical relevance remain incompletely understood. Here we use single-cell transcriptomics to chart the fibroblastic landscape during pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) progression in animal models, identifying two healthy tissue fibroblast subsets that co-evolve along individual trajectories into four subsets of carcinoma-associated fibroblasts (CAFs).