Taking on melanoma, one cell at a time
The following is adapted from a Q&A published today by the Broad Institute. Single-cell analysis is a groundbreaking approach now being used across biological fields to explore a common problem: how to study cellular diversity in cell environments with heterogeneous populations. Such diversity can have profound implications for cell survival and proliferation, response to drug therapies and interventions, as well as myriad other biological processes. Over the past two years, computational biologists and cell circuitry experts from the Klarman Cell Observatory (KCO), directed by Aviv Regev, a Broad Institute core member, professor of biology at MIT, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, have joined forces with cancer researchers from the lab of Broad Institute member Levi Garraway, director of the Joint Center for Cancer Precision Medicine (CCPM) at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the Broad Institute, to probe cancer tissue — a diverse cellular environment whose complexity has...