A new facility will isolate and analyse individual human cells to track how they change during cancer, autoimmune disease, and transplant rejection. Current methods typically study thousands of cells at once, averaging out their differences. This misses crucial variations: a single rogue cancer cell that evades treatment, or one immune cell that mistakenly attacks the body. The researchers will combine advanced cell-sorting with simultaneous analysis of genes and proteins from the same cell. They will test the system on three interconnected challenges—cancer, diabetes/arthritis, and transplant rejection—where the immune system’s relationship with “self” versus “non-self” cells is central. If successful, the facility will let scientists pinpoint exactly which cells drive disease progression or treatment resistance. This could accelerate the development of targeted therapies and monitoring tools for immune-mediated diseases and cancer. The project is primarily a technology development effort, but it is built on fundamental science: understanding how individual cells behave in complex disease environments. Similar single-cell approaches have already transformed immunology and cancer biology. The consortium aims to make this capability routine, creating a blueprint for other centres to adopt.
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We propose to create a state-of-the-art facility for studying the function and nature of single human cells involved in disease processes, combining the latest developments in cell isolation and analysis of genes and proteins. The system will be developed in collaboration with industrial partners, and exemplified via cohesive research programmes in immune-mediated disease, regenerative medicine and cancer. These provide distinct challenges but have significant cross-talk, making them ideal for exploring the full potential of the facility. For example, cancer growth and spread are characterised by variants of cells from "self" developing ways of evading the immune system; whilst autoimmune and inflammatory disease (diabetes, arthritis) arises because the immune system targets self. Moreover, in transplantation and regenerative medicine, responses to self and neo-self cells are a major barrier to graft acceptance. Through the synergistic development of new technology platforms that analyse complex cellular processes in cancer, inflammation, autoimmunity and transplantation on a single site that houses all of the relevant expertise and related infrastructure already, we aim to resolve complex disease processes at the single cell level. The expertise and methodologies brought together by the consortium create an opportunity to share technological benefits in an overlapping set of systems. Our goal is that the Single Cell-Level Functional Proteomics and Genomics system, once developed, will accelerate clinically important discoveries about disease processes, their treatment and monitoring, and act as a model for the establishment of similar facilities in centres of excellence across a range of clinical arenas.
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