Chanell Mangum

Chanell Mangum, a senior Biomedical Engineering student with a minor in history at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, used Slide-seq and RCTD to analyze the microenvironment of classic Hodgkin lymphoma.

Classic Hodgkin lymphoma is a type of blood cancer that affects the lymph nodes of the lymphatic system. Words cannot express how much BSRP means to me. I have thoroughly enjoyed this summer experience at the Broad. I have grown immensely during these past two months, professionally and personally. This experience impacted my outlook towards my long-term goals and has solidified my aspirations to pursue a career in biomedical research. Although virtual, being surrounded by a passionate and accomplished cohort, made the program feel like home. I am beyond grateful for the relationships that were curated with Broad scientists and the opportunities that I had this summer.In this unique tumor type, typically only one percent of the cells are tumor cells while the rest are diverse immune cells. Our project goal is to identify the cell types and their interactions within the tumor microenvironment to understand how these tumor cells are able to evade the immune system and are simultaneously dependent on this tissue microenvironment. By using Slide-seq, an approach that enables genome wide expression profiling at 10-micron resolution, we were able to profile primary human classic Hodgkin lymphoma and reactive lymph node tissues. Using publicly available single cell reference datasets, we were able to identify the cell types and then their spatial location in tissue sections using a probabilistic cell type deconvolution approach (robust cell type decomposition). After mapping out the cell types of Hodgkin lymphoma and reactive lymph node tissues, we found that there is a larger number of regulatory T cells and macrophages and fewer germinal center B cells in the tumors compared to reactive lymph node tissues. In future studies, we hope to examine the spatial relationships between these cell types and tumor cells to understand their contribution to the tumor cells' survival and their role in immune evasion in classic Hodgkin lymphoma.

Project: Using spatial transcriptome approaches to analyze the tumor microenvironment of classic Hodgkin lymphoma.

Mentor: Vignesh Shanmugam, Golub Lab