Mapping lung disease: new atlas to accelerate drug discovery

Helmholtz Munich and Parse Biosciences have announced a new partnership to generate what is set to become the world’s broadest lung disease perturbation atlas. The project will be powered by Parse Biosciences’ GigaLab platform and aims to provide brand new insights into lung health and disease.

Using a human lung ex-vivo tissue slice culture model from normal donor lungs, alongside explant lung tissues from patients with chronic lung disease, the study will assess how cells respond to 900 pharmacological interventions. Researchers hope the data will discover new therapeutic targets and cellular circuits that cause lung regeneration and disease progression.

Leading the way in lung biology research

The initiative will be led by Professor Herbert Schiller, Director of Helmholtz Munich’s Precision Regenerative Medicine Research Unit and a recognised leader in lung biology.

“Measuring the effects of drug treatments at single cell level directly in human lung tissue at scale, will help us to find strategies that improve lung tissue regeneration, which may lead to the targeted combination therapies of the future,” states Schiller.

Harnessing AI for disease understanding

Alongside biological exploration, the collaboration will generate the large-scale datasets required to train advanced artificial intelligence models. Professor Fabian Theis, Director of the Helmholtz Munich Computational Health Center, highlighted the importance of the data:

“To build foundational AI models of cell and tissue biology, we are in urgent need of more high-quality perturbation data – such a complex drug perturbation dataset will enable meaningful progress towards understanding gene regulation in lung health and disease.”

Powered by Parse Biosciences’ GigaLab

Central to the project is Parse Biosciences’ GigaLab, a state-of-the-art facility designed to produce massive single cell RNA sequencing datasets quickly and at scale. Built on the company’s proprietary Evercode chemistry, the GigaLab delivers both throughput and quality to match the demands of complex biological research.

“With GigaLab, we’re enabling researchers to move past incremental discoveries,” states Dr Charlie Roco, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Parse Biosciences. “Our collaboration with Helmholtz Munich demonstrates how vision and scale in single cell genomics can uncover biology, accelerating the path to better therapies.”