OWKIN Mosaic Spatial omics galactic initiative will drive the next revolution in cancer research

Innovation in healthcare does not happen evenly; it happens in fits and spurts. Great periods of innovation are often catalyzed by a new technology:? the microscope led to the discovery of cells and bacteria and more recently the sequencing of the human genome identified most of the potent oncogenes and tumor suppressors. I believe spatial omics combined with AI is the catalyst to drive the next revolution in cancer research.

Combining genes to tissues, and tumor to microenvironment, it enables discoveries on patients data that cell lines study would miss. Translation gap diminishing big time, and causal AI stepping up.

As a physician, I think of cancer as a complex ecosystem consisting of cancer cells, blood vessels that feed them, and cells of our immune system that are trying to fight the tumor. Most research has focused on the cancer cells to identify treatments, but because cancer cells are very dysregulated it’s difficult to predict how they are going to react and evolve over time. However, the support system that cancer cells are using to progress is not disrupted. It responds to predictable cues. If we learn how to really harness that microenvironment and turn it against cancer cells, major progress can be made. This is where spatial omics comes in.

Spatial omics allows researchers to examine tumors at a near single-cell resolution, while revealing the location and molecular activity of tumor and immune cells. It provides a detailed map of molecular interactions, allowing scientists to decipher key relationships between a tumor and its environment.?

I believe spatial omics will help us discover new ways to cure cancer by targeting pathways in tumour and immune cells and help us develop more precise ways to empower a patient’s immune system to fight cancer cells. Cancer heterogeneity, which fuels resistance to therapy, is another area that will hugely benefit from spatial omics.? Understanding how biology differs in patients with the same cancers will drive the development of more effective combinatorial/personalized therapies, and their prescription to the right patients.

Unfortunately, the reality is that the spatial omics datasets we have to date are very small and dispersed across research institutions.

This is why Owkin is investing $50 million to build MOSAIC (Multi Omic Spatial Atlas in Cancer). The first initiative of its kind, MOSAIC will use tumor samples from 7,000 patients, making it over 100 times larger than any existing spatial omics datasets. MOSAIC is a collaboration between Gustave Roussy, the University of Pittsburgh through the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center, Lausanne University Hospital, Uniklinikum Erlangen/Friedrich-Alexander-Universit?t Erlangen-Nürnberg, Charité - Universit?tsmedizin Berlin, NanoString Technologies and other providers of analytical instrumentation and assays for spatial biology. Owkin and the MOSAIC partners will mine this resource for immune-oncology disease subtypes in pursuit of biomarkers and novel therapies.

Learn more here https://www.mosaic-research.com/

A major driver in our decision to create MOSAIC is the fact that machine learning is essential to the process of analysing spatial omics and multimodal data. Owkin is very well positioned to lead this effort because we have significant experience in large and complex datasets, with multiple modalities across thousands of patients. Owkin’s robust machine learning capabilities are able to integrate these data and use them as a way to discover new insights. At Owkin we are successfully using AI to predict the transcriptome and visualize it spatially as heat maps of gene expression from existing H&E slides, without having to run the spatial transcriptomics experiment itself.

Applications like this will change the face of healthcare, injecting new life into precision medicine and creating new avenues for its implementation. Be part of this patient data revolution with us.