Submitted by Matthew Bothwell on Fri, 13/09/2024 - 15:50
A team of researchers has today (Friday 13th) been awarded more than £5m to establish the Spatial Profiling and Annotation Centre of Excellence (SPACE) to open up access to their groundbreaking cancer mapping technology and establish collaborations with other scientists to enable them to investigate tumours in 3D.
The technology from Cancer Grand Challenges team IMAXT uses advanced spatial biology techniques to analyse tumours, some of which are based on technology originally developed to map the Milky Way and discover new planets. Now, other scientists will be able to access these technologies to create detailed tumour maps that could one day transform how we diagnose and treat cancer.
Led out of the University of Cambridge by Professor Greg Hannon and Dr Dario Bressan (Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute) and Dr Nicholas Walton (Institute of Astronomy), SPACE will open up IMAXT’s cutting-edge spatial biology platform and establish collaborations with other scientists to enable them to investigate tumours in 3D.
The Cancer Research UK funding, through Cancer Grand Challenges, will specifically support the SPACE-Hub laboratory and SPACE analysis platform, which includes and combines most available technologies for spatial molecular profiling of tumours.
The continued collaboration between the cancer and astronomy researchers from the IMAXT team will ensure the maintenance and development of all critical aspects of the platform – from technical and scientific expertise to instrumentation, computing, and data analysis – to allow SPACE to continue to function at the forefront of the spatial omics field. It is hoped that expanding access to the technology to other scientists will accelerate the pace of new discoveries in cancer and lead to the development of new ways to use the technology in a clinical setting.
Read more at the Cancer Grand Challenges website.