Illuminate the tumor microenvironment and understand oncological heterogeneity with the MERSCOPE PanCancer Pathways Panel for Human Tissue Application Note

Designing gene panels to interrogate heterogeneous tumors across different tissues of origin can be challenging and time consuming. To address this need, we developed the 500 gene MERSCOPE PanCancer Pathways Panel to enable the spatial analysis of frequently mutated genes and other genomic abnormalities common to many different cancers. This curated panel can be used with standard Vizgen sample preparation workflows for the MERSCOPE Platform and includes markers from various cancer types to reduce overall experimental planning as well as increase data turnaround times. Here, we utilize the PanCancer Pathways Panel to assess the transcriptional signaling pathways of cancer, cancer type-specific genes, proto-oncogenes, tumor-suppressor genes, and select immune genes in multiple patient-derived cancer samples. Clustering analysis of the gene expression data resolved major cell populations across the various cancer types, facilitating comparisons between tumor cells, immune cells, and somatic cells. This work highlights the use of Vizgen’s PanCancer Pathways Panel to create molecularly defined and spatially resolved atlases of individual patient derived tumor samples and demonstrates the power of the MERSCOPE Platform to analyze the molecular basis underlying the cellular and transcriptional heterogeneity of the tumor microenvironment.