TIP: A Web Server for Resolving Tumor Immunophenotype Profiling

Abstract Systematically tracking the tumor immunophenotype is required to understand the mechanisms of cancer immunity and improve clinical benefit of cancer immunotherapy. However, progress in current research is hindered by the lack of comprehensive immune activity resources and easy-to-use tools for biologists, clinicians, and researchers to conveniently evaluate immune activity during the “cancer-immunity cycle.” We developed a user-friendly one-stop shop web tool called TIP to comprehensively resolve tumor immunophenotype. TIP has the capability to rapidly analyze and intuitively visualize the activity of anticancer immunity and the extent of tumor-infiltrating immune cells across the seven-step cancer-immunity cycle. Also, we precalculated the pan-cancer immunophenotype for 11,373 samples from 33 The Cancer Genome Atlas human cancers that allow users to obtain and compare immunophenotype of pan-cancer samples. We expect TIP to be useful in a large number of emerging cancer immunity studies and development of effective immunotherapy biomarkers. TIP is freely available for use at http://biocc.hrbmu.edu.cn/TIP/. Significance: TIP is a one-stop shop platform that can help biologists, clinicians, and researchers conveniently evaluate anticancer immune activity with their own gene expression data. See related commentary by Hirano, p. 6536