New Lung Disease Atlas: Single-Cell Analysis of 900 Drug Interventions

At the Helmholtz Center Munich, Prof. Herbert Schiller and Prof. Fabian Theis, DZL scientists at the CPC-M site, have launched an ambitious project in collaboration with Parse Biosciences to create one of the most comprehensive lung disease “perturbation atlases” to date.

The project uses ex vivo lung tissue slice cultures from both healthy donor lungs and explanted lung tissue from patients with chronic lung diseases. Using Parse Biosciences’ GigaLab single-cell sequencing platform, researchers will investigate cellular responses to 900 pharmacological interventions. The aim is to gain a better understanding of disease mechanisms and to identify potential therapeutic targets.

Prof. Herbert Schiller, Director of the Precision Regenerative Medicine Research Unit at Helmholtz Center Munich, explains: “Measuring the effects of drug treatments at the single-cell level directly in human lung tissue at scale will help us develop strategies for lung tissue regeneration, potentially paving the way for targeted combination therapies in the future.” Prof. Fabian Theis, Head of the Computational Health Center at Helmholtz Center Munich, adds: “To build robust AI models of cell and tissue biology, we urgently need high-quality perturbation data. Such a complex dataset will enable significant advances in understanding gene regulation in lung health and disease.”

The project is carried out at the Parse GigaLab, a state-of-the-art facility designed specifically for generating large-scale single-cell RNA sequencing datasets. Using Parse’s Evercode technology, the GigaLab rapidly produces large datasets with exceptional quality. Charlie Roco, co-founder and CTO of Parse Biosciences, emphasizes: “With GigaLab, we enable researchers to go beyond incremental discoveries. Our collaboration with Helmholtz Munich demonstrates how vision and scale in single-cell genomics can unlock biology and accelerate the path to better therapies.”

Source: Helmholtz Munich and Collaboration with Parse Biosciences