Single Cell and Spatial Analysis of Solid Cancers

Dear Colleagues,

Single cell analysis has the potential to become a disruptive technology in cell biology, where it has been applied to the study of tissue development and increasingly to that of cancer. The evolution of technologies spawning from next generation sequencing (NGS) has been incessant and even seemed gain momentum.

We can expect that single cell studies will yield a flurry of novel and possibly highly relevant findings in our understanding of cancer. The relative simplicity allowed to the study of leukemias has found over time little application to the study of solid cancers, hampered by technical obstacles due to comparative hardiness of these tumors. Single cell studies have the potential of breaking down all the technical walls that have been shielding solid cancers against the curiosity of the researchers. Early studies have been published and the general availability of platforms for single cell studies of DNA and RNA promise to deliver in the forthcoming years all that was not allowed in the first wave of cancer genomics.

Spatial technologies, a finally delivered twist on the top of single cell studies, could lead cancer molecular studies into a completely new dimension, allowing the investigators unprecedented insight into cancer development, progression and micro-environment. Additionally novel cancer therapy studies are expected to incorporate investigations at single cell and spatial level.

It is now being compiled a completely new dictionary for experimental and clinical oncologists that includes terms such as single-cell Genomics, cell states, cell coordinates, encoding methods, cancer architecture and cancer hierarchy. Furthermore biomedical investigators have been joined in their efforts by may talented mathematicians, chemists and physicists. Together these scientists push the boundaries of each discipline towards a truly interdisciplinary mission aimed to finally untangle the web of mechanisms that underlie human cancer establishment, evolution and drug resistance.

This topics issue of /Cancers/ represent therefore a much needed and well timed forum through steps that might hopefully lead us to uncover the best kept secrets of solid tumors.

Prof. Stefano Volinia
Guest Editor

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• scRNA seq
• Spatial Transcriptomics
• 3D Models
• Single-Cell Genomics
• Cell States
• Cell Coordinates
• Encoding Methods
• Cancer Architecture
• Cancer Hierarchy