Guest Talk | Ziqi Kang – Quantitative Spatial Analysis of the Tumor Microenvironment

On the 12th of February, we welcomed Ziqi Kang (PhD student, Färkkilä Lab, University of Helsinki) for an online guest talk on quantitative spatial analysis of the tumor microenvironment in high-grade serous ovarian cancer. Ziqi presented SPACEstat, a method tackling a key bottleneck in spatial biology: generating robust, comparable spatial measurements across slides and patient cohorts from multiplexed spatial proteomics data (e.g., tCyCIF). The framework quantifies spatial organization in biologically interpretable ways — tumor–stroma interface architecture, immune infiltration patterns, cellular neighborhoods, and cell–cell interaction networks — enabling single-cell–level comparisons across samples. The talk concluded with ongoing directions extending spatial analyses across multiple biological scales to better connect cellular interactions with tissue-level architecture.

Thank you, Ziqi, for the presentation and the lively discussion!