Scientists have used high-throughput genomic and spatial proteomic technologies to greatly enhance understanding of human cell biology. However, these technologies often force researchers to remove cells from their local environments, and cellular behaviors are heavily affected by their surroundings. Jasmine Plummer, associate member and director of the Center for Spatial Omics at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, wants to help researchers put cells back into their appropriate contexts to better understand what drives their actions in health and disease.
How did you personally become interested in spatial omics?
Jasmine Plummer, director of the Center for Spatial Omics at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, wants to make spatial omics more routine and accessible for scientists.
St. Jude Children’s Hospital
I was a molecular geneticist doing a lot of single-cell assays. Despite this, my main interests always pointed back to the tissue, because disease pathogenesis involves more than just individual cell genotypes. For example, if we look at COVID-19 responses, why did some people do better post-infection than others? Maybe they had structural impedances to the virus, or maybe the initial point of infection was at a physically different site. The same idea applies to the brain: we can look at the balance between excitatory and inhibitory neurons, but we also need to look at the location and connections that these neurons are making or not making.
What does the Center for Spatial Omics do?
What spatial omics or spatial biology means, at its most fundamental, is looking at something visually—a stained tissue section on a slide, for example—that places the objects of interest within its environment. Where the “Center” part comes in is that the technology for spatial omics has caught up in terms of data volume and throughput compared to genomics. We want to be specialists at acquiring and looking at spatial data within its context, and St. Jude has invested a lot in this, not just in terms of money, but also intellectually, to recruit specialists in this field.
How does the Center promote spatial omics?
As a principal investigator (PI) myself, our starting place is always meeting with people and seeing if we could apply spatial omics to their research goals and hypotheses. That said, the broader goal is to improve accessibility to technology. What we do at the Center for Spatial Omics is expensive, and having a bigger budget makes us more responsive and flexible to changes in technology, strategic initiative, and scope.
How much does the Center collaborate with external researchers?
We are here to support St. Jude researchers and the St. Jude research community. However, St. Jude is a global place, and most of our PIs have global collaborators, so by virtue of this collaborative environment, we extend our technology to them through their link with St. Jude. Together with two others, I co-founded a community called the Global Alliance for Spatial Technologies (GESTALT), and it has reached 1,400 members in 43 countries within 18 months. We have been able to share some of the things that the Center has allowed us to do, and it has resulted in collaborations with other areas of the scientific community such as people who work on computational pipelines.
How do you determine the future direction of the Center?
I am grateful to have strong advisory committees at St. Jude so that I do not have to make unilateral decisions, and I am also lucky to work with other leaders in the spatial field. My long-term dream is to not become bottlenecked by instrument technology, but rather for the field to move to a place where the computational aspect—especially in terms of artificial intelligence and machine learning—has aligned with or perhaps surpassed it. I think having these computational advances means that we do not have to be married to a single technology, where inputs would be more universally compatible and outputs could be applied regardless of the instrument used to generate them.
What is your goal for spatial omics as both a PI and the director of the Center?
My immediate goal is to encourage people to think more about the context of their existing data and to not fear spatial omics technology. While it can look overwhelming, scientists do not have to start with the most complicated option. For the long term, and this might put me out of a job if it comes to fruition, I want to hopefully help lower the barriers to entry, whether that is cost or accessibility. I want spatial omics to be as routine, ubiquitous, and straightforward as a hematoxylin and eosin stain.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
