Spencer S Watson

White text over a black background; “Give Cancer Hell” An OHSU Knight Cancer Institute logo is placed below.

The top text reads: Cancer is the biggest fight in the history of the world. We will win. It will be hard. We're built for it. We care. Every breath. Of every second. Of every day. Great things come from the most unexpected places. Look around. We're surrounded by heroes. This is not a job. This is our life. Cancer does not discriminate. Neither will we. Bold moves only. Cancer doesn't see us coming. We will outlast, and we will outwit it. This fight is and always will be personal. "GIVE CANCER HELL." in bold at the bottom.

Phil and Penny Knight announced today a record-breaking $2 billion gift to the Oregon Health & Science University’s Knight Cancer Institute to transform the future of cancer care and set a new standard globally.

Thank you to Phil and Penny Knight for their incredible generosity.

#GiveCancerHell

Transcriptome analysis of archived tumors by Visium, GeoMx DSP, and Chromium reveals patient heterogeneity - Nature Communications Currently, there is an urgent need to evaluate the strengths and limitations of various probe-based full transcriptome methods for formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded tumor tissues. Here, the authors ana...

🎉 New paper alert. We benchmarked Visium, GeoMx, and Chromium for FFPE tumor analysis. Thanks @estellayixingdong.bsky.social for pushing this forward, & MOSAIC collaborators!
📄 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#SpatialTranscriptomics #CancerResearch cc: @owkin.bsky.social @10xgenomics.bsky.social

And wonderful photos by our in-house photographers/ drone specialists 📷👏 @drspencerwatson.bsky.social @dolfibastien.bsky.social 🙏

This group photo was captured by drone - a J for Joyce lab 😉

My thanks again to ~50 alumni & current lab members who joined over the 3 days of this truly unique event!!

Charting the Single-Cell and Spatial Landscape of IDH-Wildtype Glioblastoma with GBmap AbstractBackground. Glioblastoma (GB), particularly IDH-wildtype, is the most aggressive brain malignancy with a dismal prognosis. Despite advances in mole

Great to see this paper finally out. We've been using it for a while, a really great resource for omics in glioblastoma!
doi.org/10.1093/neuo...

Thank you @naturemethods.bsky.social for highlighting our recent paper on "Spatial Mechano-Transcriptomics" in your April Issue:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Thrilled to announce our doctoral network for spatial oncology as been funded by Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions! This combines some of the best immuno-oncology and computational labs across Europe to create a multi-disciplinary PhD program for spatial-omics cancer research. More details soon!

Please also check out the News & Views highlighting this cool work!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

AI-driven framework to map the brain metabolome in three dimensions - Nature Metabolism This study presents MetaVision3D, a pipeline to integrate mass spectrometry imaging sections into 3D reconstructions of metabolomic maps. The authors also provide a comprehensive 3D metabolome atlas o...

What's better than spatial metabolomics? Spatial metabolomics in 3D! New from Ramon Sun and colleagues, a 3D map of the brain metabolome using AI, with an interactive database to explore. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Morning in Haute-Nendaz 🇨🇭

OMG, I feel so seen!

Also, what’s this big orange thing in the sky over London? Never seen that here before.

Fantastic scientific advisory board meeting for @braintumourcharity.bsky.social Some great applications I’m excited to see funded. Thanks again for everything the Charity does to support cutting edge brain cancer research!

Check out this amazing visualization of SNSF funding by Colas Droin! Really highlights how Switzerland has become such a scientific leader through intelligent investments in research.

colasdroin.github.io/snsf-dataviz/

Unbelievable news.

Pancreatic is one of the deadliest cancers.

New paper shows personalized mRNA vaccines can induce durable T cells that attack pancreatic cancer, with 75% of patients cancer free at three years—far, far better than standard of care.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Evening in Lutry Switzerland

I mean, who reads past the title anymore?

Absolutely not 🙅🏻‍♂️

Improvements in LM (top) and EM (bottom) of our micro-sam model (finetuned) compared to the default SAM model.

After a long journey, Segment Anything for Microscopy is now published in Nature Methods! We significantly improve SAM for interactive and automatic segmentation in light and electron microscopy and build a user-friendly tool.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Exciting to see these approaches reach clinical trials.

It’s great to see these progressive changes by @ethzurich.bsky.social. It’s hard enough getting and starting an assistant professorship, removing barriers will be a huge gain for early career scientists and academic research in Switzerland.
#EduSky #AcademicSky

RUNX2 promotes fibrosis via an alveolar-to-pathological fibroblast transition - Nature The use of two mouse models of pulmonary fibrosis helped the identification of the transcription factor RUNX2 as a regulator of the transition of alveolar fibroblasts to pathological fibroblasts.

RUNX2 promotes fibrosis via an alveolar-to-pathological fibroblast transition @nature.com
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I’m at the AI Moonshot Hackathon for glioblastoma in Paris, put on by Owkin and Servier. We have 15 teams working with spatial transcriptimics to develop new analyses for GBM. Excited to see what they come up with.
#ScienceSky #CanSky #MedSky

In Paris today speaking at the Brain Tumor Microenvironment Symposium. It’s a very impressive lineup, really looking forward to it. It’s also my first time in Paris so would love some recommendations on what to do after the symposium.
#CanSky #ScienceSky #MedSky
curamus-cancer.fr/wp-content/u...

Spatial multi-omics has just gone to the next level!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
—Integration of 5 omic modalities w/ spatial resolution at 20 -50 μm
—"a new era for characterizing tissue & cellular heterogeneity that single-modality studies alone could not reveal"

In London to speak at the British Neuropathological Society symposium. We'll be discussing how we can apply spatial-omics approaches to improve immunotherapies for glioblastoma patients.
#CanSky #ScienceSky #MedSky

www.bns.org.uk/126th-bns-me...

For sure, it definitely has the positive vibes that early Twitter had.

Deleted all FB/Insta/Meta accounts. Now I don’t have anywhere else to post cute pet pics. So for now on I’ll be posting about cutting edge cancer research, and random stuff my dog does.
#ScienceSky #CanSky #AcademicSky

A new mechanism for cancer-induced immune evasion. We knew about cancer cells hijacking mitochondria. Now we learn about how their mitochondrial transfer to T cells impairs the tumor immune response.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Making space for spatial biology in the clinic
Spatial transcriptomics methods have been slow to move into clinical practice, but spatial proteomics are cheaper and more scalable, and could progress faster go.nature.com/3PoWPkz