CRIG researcher Noah Bonine & colleagues create the 'NBAtlas' – a comprehensive cell atlas of over 360 000 cells from 61 neuroblastoma patients
Neuroblastoma is a rare but severe form of pediatric cancer that arises during the development of the sympathetic nervous system. Especially for high-risk patients, survival rates remain disappointing, even after intensive treatments.
In recent years the advent of ‘single-cell atlases’ has provided an enormously valuable source of knowledge for scientific research. With a reference transcriptome atlas of a given tissue, researchers can get a detailed picture of the different cell types and subtypes at the level of individual cells.
However, it is challenging to collect sufficient patient material for a comprehensive atlas for rare tissues such as neuroblastoma. As a solution to this, CRIG researcher Noah Bonine, along with a team supervised by Prof. Katleen De Preter and Prof. Charlotte Scott collected data from several previous studies and international collaborations to obtain a large-scale collection in this way.
By bringing all of these data together, the ‘NBAtlas’ was formed, a neuroblastoma atlas with more than 360 000 cells from 61 patients. Thanks to in-depth biological research on this, the team created a catalog of the various tumor and immune cells in neuroblastoma tumors.
In collaboration with Ghent University Hospital, the team also collected data from residual material (from biopsies or resections) for a number of neuroblastoma patients. The aforementioned atlas proved to be of great value in identifying the cell types present in these tumors.
By making the atlas publicly available, the researchers hope it can be used as a reference source for future research on the lethal childhood cancer.
You can read the original research paper, recently published in Cell Reports, via this link.