A big revolution for cancer care on a very small scale: ‘It’s like Google Maps for cells’
Mapping out every cell in a sample — and the links between them — demands huge volumes of data.
Sometimes medicine does not want large-scale solutions, it wants small-scale solutions — so small they have only just been discovered.
As lens-making led to microscopes, and synthetic dyes led to histology, AI has led to colourful maps that represent millions of cells in a tissue sample: their locations, the genes they express and their communication lines.
It is called spatial medicine and Associate Professor Arutha Kulasinghe is the world’s first Chair of Spatial Medicine.
“It’s like a Google Maps approach to understanding the tumour microenvironment,” said Professor Kulasinghe, from the University of Queensland and Wesley Research Institute in Queensland
