George Kumar: New AI Tool Reveals How Cancer Cells “Talk” to Their Neighbors
George Kumar, Senior Director at AstraZeneca, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“New AI tool reveals how cancer cells “talk” to their neighbors
Multi-scale and multi-context interpretable mapping of cell states across heterogeneous spatial samples
Researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine, Massey Comprehensive Cancer Center have developed Vesalius, a first-of-its-kind computational tool that maps not just where cells sit in a tumor, but which genes are active in each individual cell – and how that activity shapes treatment response.
Named after Andreas Vesalius, the 16th-century anatomist who revolutionized our understanding of human anatomy, this tool is doing the same for tissue architecture at the molecular scale.
Why it matters:
• Uses AI to decode spatial tissue patterns between patients who respond to therapy and those who don’t.
• Captures the microenvironment context of each cell across different samples, technologies, and resolutions.
• Identifies subpopulations of tumor and immune cells that could be driving resistance in hard-to-treat cancers.
• Creates what the team calls a new “territory of informational domain” for cancer biology.
Impact: Vesalius could guide the discovery of predictive biomarkers, reshape cancer diagnostics, and inform truly personalized therapy strategies.
Figure Courtesy: Nature Communications. Overview of Vesalius’s cell state mapping strategy.”
Title: Multi-scale and multi-context interpretable mapping of cell states across heterogeneous spatial samples
Authors: Patrick C. N. Martin, Wenqi Wang, Hyobin Kim, Henrietta Holze, Paul B. Fisher, Arturo P. Saavedra, Robert A. Winn, Esha Madan, Rajan Gogna, Kyoung Jae Won
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