Andreah D. Wallace

What does your single cell research look like? Are you exploring drug response and resistance, investigating immune response to vaccination, tracking Alzheimer’s disease pathology, or trying to uncover drivers of cancer development and patient outcomes? Maybe you’re building a comprehensive cell atlas to lay a solid foundation for the exploration of healthy development and disease progression.

Blood is often collected during routine clinical procedures and over the course of research projects, such as clinical trials or longitudinal studies. Clinicians and researchers can access a wealth of information from blood, including insights into disease progression and drug efficacies and toxicities. But due to rapid degradation of biomolecules—including RNA—analyses are often limited to protocols that can be performed within 24 hours of collection.

How do pathologists approach critical questions of disease diagnosis? What tools help them move closer to a detailed understanding of the cellular processes that lead to disease? Traditionally, histological methods have driven diagnosis, but, in recent years, highly sensitive molecular assays—including single cell analysis—have begun to provide avenues for more in-depth profiling of tissue complexity.