Single-cell Spatial-omics: with Applications to Stem Cell Engineering and Cancer Immunotherapy

With many technological breakthroughs in the past decade, single-cell biology has blossomed in many fields, enabling us to ask questions that were not possible before. However, many of the single-cell biology technologies include a dissociation step, which destroys the crucial spatial information. Therefore, a new wave of technology focusing on single-cell spatial-omics emerges to overcome this challenge. This course will explore seminal and new experimental and computational strategies employed in both the conventional single-cell omics and the new single-cell spatial-omics, emphasizing applications to stem cell engineering and cancer biology. We will teach you how to design and analyze single cell-omics data, using questions and data from stem cell biology and cancer biology to provide the motivational background. Basic stem cell and cancer biology will be covered. Pivotal studies regarding cell identity and single-cell biology will drive discussion on the fidelity of engineered cell populations and the challenges of understanding cell fate decisions.