One of the biggest technology shifts we saw in biology over the past year came from the young company, Cellanome. Instead of relying only on static single-cell snapshots, the Cellanome platform enables longitudinal observation of live cells.
In this conversation, Pier Federico Gherardini, VP of Computational Biology at Cellanome, joins Matthew Spitzer of UCSF, whose lab is putting the Cellanome platform to work in cancer immunology.
The new CellCage technology allows researchers to follow individual cells and their interactions over time, then pair that behavior with transcriptomic and other molecular readouts. As Gherardini explains, this creates “a new data type” that connects functional behavior directly to molecular biology.
For Spitzer, the breakthrough is linking phenotype and function in the same individual cell. His lab can watch dendritic cells activate T cells, or T cells interact with tumor cells, and then ask what was molecularly different about the cells that actually performed the function.
“Now we have measured the function of the cell and the phenotype for the same exact individual cell,” Spitzer says.
The result is a new way to study cell biology that could have implications for cancer immunology, cell therapy, target discovery, and functional screening.
