Bioinformatics Research

Clinical Research in Bioinformatics

As the new frontier in biomedical research, spatial technologies permit the fine-grained investigation of the role of tissue architecture, the microenvironment and cell-to-cell communication on function and transcriptional profiles. This information is central to basic, translational and clinical cancer research, with a myriad of downstream applications, and we expect them to expand and potentially rewrite our understanding of human pathologies.

Made possible by a grant from the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, BIDMC's Cancer Bioinformatics Program is the first of its kind to form a nucleus of these advanced technologies side-by-side and render them available to the entire research community. Our mission is to make these technologies more accessible, enabling multidisciplinary innovation to develop novel cancer treatments and diagnostics across healthcare, academia, research and industry.

The leading-edge spatial transcriptomic technologies available in the Cancer Bioinformatics Program include:

• Super resolution microscopy (Bruker Vutara VXL)
• Subcellular resolution targeted spatial transcriptomics (Vizgen MERSCOPE)
• Hypothesis-free spatial tissue gene expression (10x Genomics Visium)
• Region of interest (ROI)-based whole transcriptome spatial assays (NanoString DSP)
• Robotic single cell technologies (10x Genomics Chromium Connect)
• Tissue microarray creation (3DHISTECH TMA Grandmaster)
• High plexity immunohistochemistry (Akoya Phenoptics and CODEX)