Spatial Multiomics Grant Award - PhenoCycler
Make sequencing data more insightful with spatial phenotyping over 25 biomarkers on whole tissue
About the Grant Program
This grant program provided the opportunity for genomics researcher to couple their sequencing data with high resolution single cell protein measurement, through the power of PhenoCycler™. The PhenoCycler System along with our deep immune profiling panels allows for spatially resolved, highly multiplexed biomarker analysis to enable the study of different cell phenotypes, and how they interact in situ to impact disease pathology and progression.
Announcing the Grant Recipient
Akoya Biosciences would like to thank all the researchers who submitted applications for this grant program. The quality of abstracts was exceptionally high, and our review team had a difficult task to review the hundreds of abstracts received. After careful consideration we are pleased to announce the grant recipient is:
Dr. David Braun
Assistant Professor
Yale Center of Molecular and Cellular Oncology, Yale School of Medicine
Assistant Professor
Yale Center of Molecular and Cellular Oncology, Yale School of Medicine
Project Summary: My prior work utilized droplet-based scRNA-seq to understand how the immune microenvironment of kidney cancer (renal cell carcinoma) evolves with advancing disease stage (Braun et al, Cancer Cell, 2021). We identified a bi-directional “immune dysfunction circuit” of cell-cell interactions between CD8+ T cells and macrophages that was associated with a worse prognosis. This work highlighted the critical important of spatial context in understanding the tumor-immune microenvironment. We have now generated a robust scRNA-seq (and CITE-seq) dataset of the tumor-immune microenvironment for kidney cancer patients treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors, and have detailed response/resistance annotation for each. This work seeks to understand what features of the tumor-immune microenvironment impact response or resistance to current immunotherapy, with the hope that it will lead to novel approaches to combination immune-based therapeutic approaches. This grant award would allow simultaneous spatial characterization of already obtained pre-treatment tumor tissue, and would allow us to integrate with our droplet-based scRNA-seq dataset to understand how cell-cell interactions and cellular “neighborhoods” in the microenvironment contribute to response and resistance.
Congratulations Dr. Braun!
Want to learn more about PhenoCycler or interested in our Spatial Technology Exploration Program (STEP) services?
