Single-cell technologies and analyses in hematopoiesis and hematological malignancies

Abstract

In recent years, single-cell technologies have emerged as breakthrough techniques that enable the characterization of hematopoietic cell populations of normal and malignant tissue samples and will be combined in the near future with bulk technologies, currently used in clinical practice, to improve diagnosis, prognosis, and the search for novel molecular targets. These single-cell methods have the advantage of not masking cell-to-cell variation features and involve the study of genetic, epigenetic, transcriptional, and proteomic landscapes from a single-cell perspective. Latest advances in this field have enabled the development of novel strategies that significantly increase both sensitivity and high throughput. In this review, we emphasize emerging techniques aimed at assessing individual or multiomic parameters at single-cell resolution and analyze how these technologies have helped us understand hematopoietic variability and identify unknown and/or rare subpopulations. We also summarize the impact of these single-cell profiling strategies on the characterization of cell diversity within the tumor and the clonal evolution of multiple hematological malignancies in samples from untreated and treated patients, which provide valuable information for diagnosis, prognosis, and future treatments and explain why current therapies may fail. However, despite these improvements, new challenges lie ahead.