Dr Rosalin Cooper, Emily Thomas and Professor Daniel Royston and colleagues are using spatial transcriptomic (ST) technologies to create a spatial map of the bone marrow in patients with blood cancer. Their paper, published in Leukemia, draws on their recent experience, providing an overview of these technologies, and outlining a framework of good practice for tissue-based quality control (QC) for ST analysis.
Dr Cooper, from RDM’s Nuffield Division of Clinical Laboratory Sciences (NDCLS) said: ‘Many blood cancers develop in the bone marrow. Our understanding of why people develop blood cancer is limited by our ability to quantify marrow-based features. This is also a major barrier to the development of better diagnostic pathways.
‘These novel ST technologies allow us to systematically quantify the marrow microenvironment, identifying spatial relationships between cells. This will allow us to create a ‘spatial map’ of the bone marrow in patients with blood cancer.’
Researcher Emily Thomas added: ‘These platforms have huge potential. However, we find that there are pitfalls related to tissue-based QC. The workflow we outline addresses these features and will be useful to other researchers in future.’
Professor Royston, from NDCLS, said: ‘We hope our work will underpin the development of both new pathobiological insights into the bone marrow microenvironment, and support the development of tools that will help the care team diagnose patients and plan the best treatment for patients with blood cancer.’