The multi-year study uses single cell and spatial technologies to identify biomarkers for treatment response across multiple solid tumor types.
10x Genomics and Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV) launched a research collaboration to advance diagnostic applications of single cell and spatial technologies for cancer care.
Through the multi-year collaboration, researchers intend to use the Flex Apex and Xenium platforms from 10x Genomics to examine tumor samples from patients with advanced cancer undergoing evaluation by a clinical molecular tumor board. The research aims to identify clinically relevant biomarkers that may help predict treatment response and cancer prognosis while supporting diagnostic development.
The study is expected to include hundreds of patients across multiple solid tumor types, including non-small cell lung cancer, breast cancer, bladder cancer, and melanoma. The research team plans to integrate single cell and spatial biology with clinical outcomes data to better understand mechanisms of response and resistance across therapeutic approaches, including antibody-drug conjugates, bispecific antibodies, and immune checkpoint inhibitors.
“This collaboration brings together complementary expertise in spatial biology, pathology, computational AI and clinical precision oncology to address one of the biggest challenges in cancer care: predicting which patients will benefit from treatment,” says Raphael Gottardo, professor and director of the Biomedical Data Science Center at CHUV, in a release. “Together, we aim to discover clinically actionable biomarkers that improve patient selection and bring more precise treatment decisions closer to routine clinical care.”
The expansion of targeted therapies and immunotherapies is creating new opportunities for patient care while increasing the complexity of oncology treatment decisions. This trend has led to a growing need for biomarkers that can predict which patients are most likely to benefit from specific therapies.
“The promise of precision oncology depends on understanding the biology that helps determine which therapies are most likely to benefit a given patient,” says Serge Saxonov, co-founder and CEO of 10x Genomics, in a release. “We believe single cell and spatial technologies provide a fundamentally richer view of the biology within tumors and their microenvironment, creating opportunities to discover biomarkers that can help guide treatment decisions and enable future diagnostic approaches in cancer care.”
The collaboration intends to generate a multimodal resource integrating single cell and spatial data to enable the discovery of biomarkers. The partners also plan to evaluate how these biomarkers could be incorporated into future clinical reporting frameworks to support personalized treatment planning and molecular tumor board decision-making. The study also intends to investigate how these technologies can be deployed clinically alongside current standard-of-care assays.
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