Cancer Plasticity Atlas To Improve Cancer Therapies
Helmholtz Munich, the Wellcome Sanger Institute, and Parse Biosciences have announced a collaboration to develop a single cell atlas focused on cancer plasticity and its response to therapies. This initiative will lay the foundation for a larger consortium aiming to map hundreds of millions of cells to support cancer research and drug development.
The project will combine novel organoid perturbation techniques and artificial intelligence (AI) to generate a comprehensive dataset for modelling drug effects and cancer mechanisms.
Prof. Fabian Theis, Head of the Computational Health Center at Helmholtz Munich and Associate Faculty at the Sanger Institute, and Dr. Mathew Garnett, Group Leader at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, will lead the collaboration.
Theis’ team is recognized for pioneering computational algorithms to solve complex biological challenges at the intersection of AI and single cell genomics, in particular for in silico modeling of drug effects on cellular systems.
Garnett’s team has developed scalable 3D organoid cultures that replicate key characteristics of patient tumor. These “mini-tumors-in-a-dish” models will be used to study cancer plasticity and treatment responses.
The initiative will be conducted at Parse Biosciences’ GigaLab, a facility designed for high-throughput, large-scale single-cell RNA sequencing. Together, the teams have implemented automated laboratory and computational workflows to efficiently manage and analyze large datasets.
The collaboration aims to create a single-cell reference map to enable virtual cell modeling, supporting prediction of drug effects, resistance development, and identification of potential treatment targets.
“We have developed a transformational platform to enable both large-scale organoid screening and the downstream data generation and analysis. We’re excited to apply these technologies in a study of such a broad scale, which has the potential to redefine our understanding of therapeutic responses in cancer,” said Mathew Garnett “Collaboration is at the core of the innovation that happens at Sanger and studies of this magnitude are critical to the development of foundational models to better help us understand cancer progression and bring much needed advancement in the field.“
“Our vision of a virtual cell perturbation model is becoming increasingly feasible with recent advances in AI – but to scale effectively, we need large, high-quality single-cell perturbation datasets. This collaboration enables that scale, and I’m excited to move toward AI-driven experimental design in drug discovery,” said Fabian Theis.
Dr. Charlie Roco, Chief Technology Officer at Parse Biosciences, said: “We are incredibly excited to bring the power of GigaLab to visionary partners. Combining the expertise of the Wellcome Sanger Institute with the speed and scale achieved by the GigaLab enable the opportunity to fundamentally change our understanding of cancer.”
