scXpand: Pan-cancer detection of T cell clonal expansion from single-cell RNA sequencing without paired single-cell TCR sequencing.

scXpand accurately detects T cell clonal expansion across multiple cancers using only single-cell RNA sequencing data, achieving high robustness without paired TCR sequencing.

• Why it matters: Understanding T cell clonal dynamics is crucial for cancer immunology, but current methods are limited by the need for paired TCR sequencing, restricting broad application across datasets.
• What they did: The team developed scXpand, a machine-learning framework trained on a large pan-cancer database of 2.6 million T cells with paired scRNA and TCR data, enabling detection without TCR information.
• The result: scXpand reliably predicts T cell clonal expansion in various tissues and subtypes, facilitating scalable analysis of existing scRNA-seq datasets and advancing immune profiling in cancer research.