{"entity":{"id":"cell-composition-confound","kind":"term","name":"Cell composition confound (tumour versus stroma and immune cells)","aka":["cell composition confound","cell-mix confound","stromal contamination","immune infiltration confound"],"tldr":"Because a tumour sample is a mix of cancer, stromal and immune cells, a difference between two samples may only reflect a different mix of cells.","summary":"The tumour microenvironment, as Wikipedia describes it, is the ecosystem of cancer cells, stromal tissue, immune cells and extracellular matrix around a tumour. Any measurement on the whole sample (bulk expression, methylation, a region of a spatial section) averages over that mix, so an apparent risk or subtype difference between regions or patients can be a composition difference rather than a change in the cancer cells themselves. Deconvolution and purity estimates are the usual corrections.","asOf":"2026-09-24","wikipedia":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumor_microenvironment","links":[{"label":"Wikipedia","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumor_microenvironment"}],"tags":["cansim-terms"],"related":["cancer-ai-vocabulary"],"cancers":[],"sections":[],"technologies":[],"targets":[],"drugs":[],"companies":[],"institutions":[],"pathways":[],"terms":["tumour-purity","microenvironment-inflammation-theory"],"trials":[],"people":[],"bottlenecks":[],"keyPapers":[],"journals":[],"dependsOn":[],"notes":["Listed in the CanSim terms map 1.0.0 (docs/onco/terms.json, generated 2026-09-24), CC BY 4.0, attribution: CanSim project, an open, public-data-first cancer foundation-model programme; CanSim page path /terms/cell-composition-confound."],"provenance":{"editedBy":"OnCo CanSim terms wave (Wikipedia summaries, standards and project pages, GDC and FDA pages, Europe PMC)","editedOn":"2026-09-24","note":"CanSim terms map 1.0.0 (docs/onco/terms.json, generated 2026-09-24), CC BY 4.0, attribution: CanSim project, an open, public-data-first cancer foundation-model programme"},"category":"Cancer biology"},"route":"/terms/cell-composition-confound/","neighbours":{"term":[{"id":"cancer-ai-vocabulary","kind":"term","name":"Cancer AI vocabulary (CanSim terms map)","route":"/terms/cancer-ai-vocabulary/"},{"id":"microenvironment-inflammation-theory","kind":"term","name":"Microenvironment and inflammation: tumours as wounds that do not heal","route":"/terms/microenvironment-inflammation-theory/"},{"id":"desmoplastic-stroma-rich","kind":"term","name":"Stroma-rich and desmoplastic tumours in molecular data","route":"/terms/desmoplastic-stroma-rich/"},{"id":"tumour-purity","kind":"term","name":"Tumour purity","route":"/terms/tumour-purity/"}]}}