{"id":6514,"date":"2025-09-10T07:04:33","date_gmt":"2025-09-10T05:04:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dbis.rwth-aachen.de\/dbis\/?p=6514"},"modified":"2026-01-27T12:30:01","modified_gmt":"2026-01-27T11:30:01","slug":"mosaic-malignant-cell-atlas-based-on-single-cell-transcriptomics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dbis.rwth-aachen.de\/dbis\/index.php\/2025\/mosaic-malignant-cell-atlas-based-on-single-cell-transcriptomics\/","title":{"rendered":"MOSAIC: Malignant Cell Atlas based on Single-cell Transcriptomics"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Cancer remains one of the most devastating diseases worldwide, with high mortality rates and limited long-term treatment success. While therapies have advanced, most current interventions only provide marginal improvements in overall survival and progression-free survival. A major reason for this limited success lies in the <strong>heterogeneity of cancer cells<\/strong>\u2014even within a single tumor, cells can differ dramatically in their molecular states, drug sensitivities, and potential for metastasis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) has revolutionized our ability to study this complexity. Unlike traditional bulk RNA sequencing, scRNA-seq allows us to profile gene expression at the resolution of <strong>individual cells<\/strong>, revealing subtle differences in cell populations, lineage trajectories, and cell\u2013cell interactions. Recent advances in platforms such as 10x Genomics have enabled the profiling of <strong>millions of cells in a single experiment<\/strong>, offering unprecedented insights into disease biology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Despite progress, one crucial gap remains: the lack of a <strong>comprehensive, cancer-focused cell atlas<\/strong> that integrates diverse datasets to capture malignant cell heterogeneity across tissues. Moreover, while large foundation models have transformed fields like natural language processing and computer vision, their potential in <strong>single-cell biology<\/strong>\u2014and specifically cancer biology\u2014remains largely unexplored. Early efforts such as <strong>scGPT<\/strong> and <strong>Geneformer<\/strong> demonstrate the promise of large-scale, self-supervised learning in biology, but no existing cross-organ, cancer-specific foundation model currently exists to connect cellular states with patient outcomes such as survival and treatment resistance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Cancer remains one of the most devastating diseases worldwide, with high mortality rates and limited long-term treatment success. While therapies have advanced, most current interventions only provide marginal improvements in overall survival and progression-free survival. A major reason for this limited success lies in the heterogeneity of cancer cells\u2014even within a single tumor, cells can [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-project"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbis.rwth-aachen.de\/dbis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbis.rwth-aachen.de\/dbis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbis.rwth-aachen.de\/dbis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbis.rwth-aachen.de\/dbis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbis.rwth-aachen.de\/dbis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6514"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dbis.rwth-aachen.de\/dbis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6514\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6873,"href":"https:\/\/dbis.rwth-aachen.de\/dbis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6514\/revisions\/6873"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbis.rwth-aachen.de\/dbis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbis.rwth-aachen.de\/dbis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbis.rwth-aachen.de\/dbis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}