From strategy planning to Exchange Dialogues, sample exchange and participation at conferences between MAX IV and SciLifeLab.
This story starts already in February 2024, when InfraLife held a strategy day, where SciLifeLab welcomed members of the InfraLife project group to Campus Solna, in Stockholm. Here Charlotte Stadler presented the techniques available at the SciLifeLab Spatial platform and to start exploring possible synergies with imaging methods at MAX IV. An idea emerged, that the methods described could be complementary to an ongoing industry collaboration project performed at the NanoMAX beamline at MAX IV.
The project and the connections
In this project, Bryan Falcones and fellow researchers at Lund University study the pathophysiology of chronic lung diseases. The main two projects involve understanding the mechanobiology of COPD and the elemental pathology of lung fibrosis and COPD and bridging the gap between the elemental and the molecular data.
To this end, in June and August 2024, InfraLife hosted Exchange Dialogues focused on Spatial methods, which is a format used for connecting those with similar research interests at the infrastructures to promote collaboration and technology development. Representatives from SciLifeLab’s Spatial Proteomics unit , MAX IV beamline NanoMAX, and MAX IV beamline SoftiMAX presented themselves and discussed possible synergies. The discussion took off rapidly and mutual interest to exchange samples to test feasibility on multi-using these sequentially to decipher more knowledge emerged. Since then, samples have been exchanged in pilot studies funded by the InfraLife project. More on this development will be described in future stories.
One idea has led to another and on October 1st, the InfraLife project and MAX IV and Lund University researcher Bryan Falcones attended the SciLifeLab annual summit, on Spatial Methods to get even more inspiration and connections.
I am very interested in the methods employed in the spatial -omics techniques, specifically in multimodal technique combination, from the sample preparation up until the data management. Some of the the most inspiring talks and learnings from the conference were from Jeffrey M. Spraggins from Vanderbilt University and Sinem Saka, EMBL Heidelberg when talking about inmuno-SABER technology
The talk from Arutha Kulasinghe from the University of Queensland was excellent, says Bryan. Furthermore, he mentioned a study on lung cancer (NSCLC) in non-respondent patients, where combining spatial MS and proteomics, he identified increased protein GPX 1&4 in macrophages. These proteins are involved in iron metabolism and ferroptosis (a programmed cell dead). My last scans at MAX IV showed increased iron accumulation within presumable macrophages cells in lung fibrosis samples. From a tissue biology perspective, fibrosis and the extracellular environment of solid tumors have been described to share signalling pathways Bryan explains.
Check out the SciLifeLab video from the event.
InfraLife Project Coordinator, Josefin Lundgren Gawell also attended the conference and presented the InfraLife poster about the three infrastructures. Here in dialogue with SciLifeLab Precision Medicine capability lead Åsa Johansson.
Useful links
https://www.infralife.se/activities/workshops-and-seminars/exchange-dialogues/