Regional Provision of Nanostring CosMx Spatial Molecular Imager

这笔拨款将用于资助尖端成像设备，使科学家能够以前所未有的细节可视化我们身体组织的健康和疾病。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，并了解它们是如何相互作用的。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激活。这已经提供了大量的信息，并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一场足球比赛中两支球队的每个成员的姓名和角色，但只允许通过广播收听比赛。这笔拨款将资助的新设备使我们能够像现场一样观看整场足球比赛：我们可以在组织本身中非常详细地看到细胞中基因的开启，使我们能够了解不同类型的细胞如何在当地社区相互交流，从而驱动炎症、癌症和衰老等过程。正在进行的COVID-19大流行影响到身体的多个组织，突出了从根本上理解这些问题的重要性。我们将把这台新设备放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，同时还有受过专业培训的工作人员。这将确保由这种新设备实现的研究能够迅速交付，并将为尽可能多的研究人员提供，以便在科学和医学方面取得最大的进步。

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.