12 Million Euro Grant Awarded to SPACETIME for Lung Cancer Research
SPACETIME, a consortium project involving Helmholtz Munich and coordinated by VU University Medical Center Amsterdam (VUMC), has received a 12 million euro grant from the EU Mission on Cancer call. Over the next five years, 15 partners across seven European countries will conduct fundamental cancer research. Among the collaborators from Helmholtz Munich are scientific teams led by Fabian Theis, Malte Lücken, Ewa Szczurek and Thomas Walzthöni. Their goal will be to model and analyze multimodal single-cell and spatial cellular niches that characterize disease progression in lung cancer patients.
The EU Mission on Cancer aims to improve the lives of over 3 million people before 2030 through prevention, better treatments, and enhanced quality of life for cancer patients and their families. The SPACETIME project aligns with this mission by investigating the development of the lung cancer microenvironment over the next five years. This microenvironment consists of cancerous cells, immune cells, and other supporting cells within tumors, and its composition can significantly impact therapy responses, such as to immunotherapy.
To understand the development of this complex environment, SPACETIME consortium partners will use advanced technologies to analyze biopsies from lung cancer patients at various disease stages, as well as samples from relevant animal models. The data collected will be processed using computational models to identify recurring patterns, which will then be tested for their relevance to specific cancer treatments.
This research requires close collaboration among researchers from diverse scientific backgrounds, a hallmark of the SPACETIME consortium. The project’s ultimate goal is to develop insights that will enable physicians to predict the most effective treatments for each patient.
Helmholtz Munich Scientist involved in the SPACETIME project
- Prof. Fabian Theis is Director of the Computational Health Center at Helmholtz Munich. His lab will contribute methods to integrate mass-spec imaging glycomics and metabolomics data with spatial transcriptomics data across resolutions and samples.
- Dr. Malte Lücken is a Principal Investigator at the Computational Health Center and the Environmental Health Center at Helmholtz Munich. He will lead the computational work package and his lab will contribute the analysis and integrative modelling of single-cell and spatial multimodal data (glycomics, metabolomics, proteomics, and transcriptomics) to identify cellular niches that are associated with cancer progression across human and mouse model samples.
- Prof. Ewa Szczurek is Co-Director at the Institute of AI for Health at Helmholtz Munich. Her lab will contribute to the integrative analysis of spatial patterns in massspec-imaging (MSI) glycomics and metabolomics, as well as single cell RNA-sequencing and spatial transcriptomics data. The team will focus on multimodal data integration over time and space, proposing a novel hidden factor approach accounting for temporal sampling of data, using probabilistic and variational autoencoder-based models.
- Dr. Thomas Walzthöni is Head of the Bioinformatics Platform at the Genomics Core Facility at Helmholtz Munich. His Bioinformatics Platform will contribute to seamless data sharing and standardised data processing. It will work closely with the data analysis groups to transform the developed analysis scripts into shareable, reproducible and interoperable computational workflows that can be used by all partners. In addition, the platform will develop and offer training courses and workshops.
