What cell types cause and perpetuate disease? For many diseases, scientists only have guesses to this critical question. Single cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) presents a new opportunity to survey the full range of cells in a tissue and dissect how individual cell types change in their expression profiles, abundance, and interactions in the disease context. scRNA-seq can also reveal unexpected new subtypes or functional states related to disease.

 

In this webinar, Dr. Sarah Middleton, Computational Biologist at GlaxoSmithKline, will discuss how taking a cell type–first approach to understanding disease can be a powerful strategy to inform multiple steps of the drug discovery pipeline, from target identification to patient stratification. A key requirement for success of this strategy is accurate and deep cell-type classification, which remains challenging, especially for subtypes. Dr. Middleton will discuss how to alleviate these challenges both through computational approaches and integration of multiomic data types. Finally, she will discuss what is needed to scale up these approaches and make full use of the huge compendiums of single cell data now becoming available.

 

Learning Objectives