Regional Provision of Nanostring CosMx Spatial Molecular Imager

这笔赠款将资助尖端的成像设备，使科学家能够在健康和疾病中以前所未有的细节可视化我们身体的组织。这将使他们能够同时确定关键细胞类型，受体和过程的水平，位置和功能，并了解它们如何相互作用。最近的技术进步--“单细胞测序”--使医生和科学家能够从组织样本中提取细胞，并确定每个细胞中哪些基因被打开。这提供了大量信息，改变了我们对疾病的理解。然而，这种方法提供的数据类似于知道足球比赛中两支球队每个成员的名字和角色，但只允许在收音机上收听比赛。这笔赠款将资助的新设备使我们能够像现场一样观看整个足球比赛：我们实际上可以在组织本身中看到细胞中异常详细的基因开关，使我们能够了解不同类型的细胞如何在局部社区中相互交流，以推动炎症，癌症和衰老等过程。持续的COVID-19大流行影响身体的多个组织，凸显了从根本上理解这些问题的重要性。我们将把这种新设备放置在伯明翰大学的一个专门研究组织的专业设施中，该设施拥有多台机器和资源，可以为组织研究提供额外的补充数据，同时还有经过专业培训的工作人员。这将确保通过这种新设备进行的研究能够迅速交付，并将提供给尽可能多的研究人员，以便在科学和医学方面取得尽可能大的进步。

This grant will fund cutting-edge imaging equipment allowing scientists to visualise our body's tissues in unprecedented detail in health and disease. This will enable them to simultaneously determine the levels, location, and function of crucial cell types, receptors and processes, and understand how they interact. Recent advances in technology - "single cell sequencing" - have allowed doctors and scientists to extract cells from tissue samples and determine which genes are switched on in each individual cell. This has been hugely informative and has changed our understanding of disease. However the data this approach provides is akin to knowing the name and role of every member of the two teams in a football match, but only being allowed to listen to the game on the radio. The new equipment this grant will fund allows us to watch the whole football game as if live: We can actually see the genes switched on in cells in extraordinary detail in the tissues themselves, allowing us to understand how different types of cell communicate with one another in local neighbourhoods to drive processes such as inflammation, cancer and ageing. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which affects multiple tissues in the body, has highlighted the importance of understanding these issues at a fundamental level. We will place this new equipment in a specialist facility in the University of Birmingham that is dedicated to the study of tissue, and has multiple machines and resources that provide additional complementary data for tissue studies, alongside specialist trained staff. This will ensure that the research enabled by this new equipment will be delivered rapidly, and will be available to the largest possible number of researchers in order to make the greatest possible advances in science and medicine.