What is cancer cartography?
Spatial profiling has identified phenotypes that predict treatment response across cancer types, yet almost none can be measured within routine clinical workflows.
The authors propose using the term ‘cancer cartography’ for the process of selecting validated spatial phenotypes for clinically deployable tumor maps that guide treatment selection.
Clinically useful spatial features should be built from a deliberately restricted vocabulary: the identity of a cell, its proximity to another, the compartment it occupies, and its state of activation, rather than from unsupervised neighborhoods whose definitions do not transfer between studies.
Validation requires statistically robust prospective human studies of prespecified phenotypes, since preclinical models do not fully reproduce human tumor architecture.
https://www.cell.com/trends/cancer/fulltext/S2405-8033(26)00236-0
