LAUSR

The US Black population consists of both US-born Black and immigrant Black populations from the Caribbean and Africa. Normal tissues in Black individuals, independent of their country of birth or residence, are woefully understudied. Yet, Black individuals disproportionately develop aggressive pathologic diseases and are treatment refractory or resistant, thus leaing to premature deaths. In women, breast cancer is more common among US Black women, and the most common non-viral driven cancer in African and Caribbean countries. Furthermore, Black women develop this disease younger than other ancestral groups and have a higher incidence aggressive pathologies, such as metaplastic and triple-negative breast cancer. With the African-Caribbean Cancer Consortium (AC3) and Transatlantic Gynecologic Cancer Research Consortium, we have created a multiomic spatial atlas of triple-negative and other breast cancers across Africa, the Caribbean, and among US-Black individuals. We performed ultrahigh-plex RNA and protein spatial phenotyping on the PhenoCycler-Fusion (PCF). The PCF is a fast end-to-end spatial biology platform that enables whole-slide spatial readouts of RNA and protein moieties at single-cell resolution. Multiomic spatial phenotyping of tissues allowed for the detection of novel cell populations associated with a given African ancestry linking unique immune/stromal cell types to the outcome and severity of breast cancer. Here, we aim to develop a benchmark that confidently measures and interprets ancestral genomic differences at the cellular level. Deciphering the relationship between African ancestry, aggressive disease biology, and early onset will enable the characterization of the tissue composition and the proportion of cell sub-populations implicated in tumorigenesis and the interplay with germline genetics. Citation Format: Jasmine T. Plummer, Nadezhda Nikulina, Ayodele Omotoso, Destiny Burnett, Priscilla Coelho, Simone Badal, Judith Hurley, Carmen Gomez, Ha Yeun Ji, Maycon Marcao, Felipe Dezem Segato, Oliver Braubach, Sophia George. A multiomic spatial atlas of breast cancer in women of African ancestry [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2023; Part 1 (Regular and Invited Abstracts); 2023 Apr 14-19; Orlando, FL. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2023;83(7_Suppl):Abstract nr 1968.