Deconvolution of the tumor-educated platelet transcriptome reveals activated platelet and inflammatory cell transcript signatures [RNA-seq]

Tumor-educated platelets (TEPs) are a potential method of liquid biopsy for the diagnosis and monitoring of cancer. However, the mechanism underlying tumor education of platelets is not known, and transcripts associated with TEPs are often not tumor-associated transcripts. We demonstrate that direct tumor transfer of transcripts to circulating platelets is an unlikely source of the TEP signal. We use CDSeq, a latent Dirichlet allocation algorithm, to deconvolute the TEP signal in blood samples from patients with glioblastoma. We demonstrate that a significant proportion of transcripts in the platelet transcriptome are derived from non-platelet cells, and the use of this algorithm allows the removal of contaminant transcripts. Furthermore, we used the results of this algorithm to demonstrate that TEPs represent a subset of more activated platelets, which also contain transcripts normally associated with non-platelet inflammatory cells, suggesting that these inflammatory cells, possibly in the tumor microenvironment, transfer transcripts to platelets that are then found in circulation. Our analysis suggests a useful and efficient method of processing TEP transcriptomic data to enable the isolation of a unique TEP signal associated with specific tumors.