The advent of immune oncology had a significant impact on the stratification of cancer patients in the past few years.
Furthermore, immune cell phenotyping of the tumor microenvironment is becoming a tool not only for the identification of novel predictive biomarkers for cancer immunotherapy, but also for prognostic markers that may help to understand several mechanisms like invasion and epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT).ā
We demonstrate how multiplexed immunofluorescence (mIF) assays and digital image analysis helped to investigate tumor budding in clinical colorectal cancer specimens by evaluating the tumor microenvironment and activated fibroblasts and considering also other parameters like MSI/MMRD status.