Spatial Omics: The New Era for Precision Medicine Collaborative Workshop

Understanding the spatial context of the changes and tissue heterogeneity that occur in molecular and cellular interactions during disease is critical for the development of effective diagnostics and novel therapies. Spatial omics or spatial biology, is the recently coined blanket term covering the science and technologies that allow scientists and clinicians to study these changes: to visualize and study the interactions of individual molecules, tissues, and cells in context in 2D or 3D space. With multiple technologies still in the early development phase, a key practical challenge for spatial omics is how to develop standardized, integrated experimental and computational methods to jointly analyze single cell sequencing, multi-modal spatial omics, and imaging data. Acknowledging a growing interest in and reliance single cell sequencing, spatial transcriptomics, spatial proteomics, spatial metabolomics, and the advanced data analysis, this collaborative workshop will feature faculty from McGovern Medical School, McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics, Institute of Molecular Medicine, and School of Public Health at UTHealth Houston, who are conducting cutting-edge research and applying the latest spatial omics and bioinformatics to different diseases at UTHealth Houston. The workshop program will feature a brief overview of spatial omics and integrated data analysis, as well as presentations on various applications of spatial omics and computational modeling approaches.