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Medical and health sciences
- Hepatology
- Histology
- Cancer therapy
Spatial biology is the next frontier in medical sciences. Due to recent investments in spatial technologies from academic labs and instrument vendors, it is now possible to interrogate the spatial RNA, protein and metabolite expression in every single cell within tissues. This holds the promise to revolutionize our knowledge of the molecular basis of diseases and to strongly improve our understanding of the local mechanism of action of drugs. Bringing the spatial revolution to the biomedical industry will however require ready-to-use protocols for the acquisition of spatial omics data and the development of novel computational pipelines that can efficiently analyze these data. The analysis of spatial omics data cannot realistically be performed manually. The ASAP-consortium will develop spatial omics protocols and matching marker panels that will be applicable on commercial spatial instruments. The consortium will also leverage its expertise in artificial intelligence to develop a novel AI-driven spatial analysis algorithm that can efficiently process spatial datasets and extract meaningful biomedical insights automatically. The power of our pipeline will be tested on a pre-clinical liver metastasis model. We will assess the capacity of the ASAP-pipeline to automatically evaluate the therapeutic efficacy of multiple drug combinations against liver metastasis and extract the histopathological features, the cellular organization and the spatial drug distribution patterns from the spatial omics data. The integrated statistical analysis of these data will determine the effect of each selected drug on the tumour and its micro-environment and will unravel whether the presence of specific multi-cellular neighborhoods correlates with the clinical response. Altogether, the ASAP-project will enable the application of spatial single-cell research to the biomedical industry in Flanders by developing new tools and methods for generating and analyzing spatial multi-omic data.