Allen Institute launches CellScapes initiative
Transforming our understanding of how human cells build tissues and organs
by Peter Kim
CellScapes marks a new era of cellular biology promising to drive advancements in cancer therapies and regenerative medicine
The Allen Institute today announced the launch of CellScapes, a bold new research initiative aimed at revolutionizing how scientists understand and predict the behavior of human cells as they work together to build tissues and organs. The goal: to uncover the rules and principles of how cells cooperate to make decisions in the body and provide scientists with the tools to predict—and even design—how cells behave together in health and disease.
CellScapes introduces a groundbreaking approach that will combine cutting-edge imaging and powerful computer models to track how cells change, communicate, and organize.
Understanding the building blocks of life
“Cells don’t act alone. They constantly shift and collaborate in ways we’re just beginning to deeply understand,” said Ru Gunawardane, Ph.D., Executive Director and Vice President of the Allen Institute for Cell Science. “With CellScapes, we’re moving beyond the static snapshots of biology and toward a living, dynamic picture of how cells create life.”
CellScapes will describe these changes in mathematical terms to empower researchers to test, model, and predict cell behavior with unprecedented clarity. This critical insight will offer new ways to measure and represent cells that will redefine how we study them.
“It’s a lot like astronomy and going from ‘which planet is that dot in the sky’ to ‘what are the laws of motion that describe all moving objects?’” says Wallace Marshall, Ph.D., professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco and an advisor on the new initiative. “Once we can mathematically describe the cell and it’s behavior at a higher level and add the laws of motion like the Allen Institute is attempting to do, it’s going to change the kind of question[s] cell biologist[s] ask.”
Unlike traditional methods that focus on the molecules that make up cells or snapshot observations in time, CellScapes will uncover how cells behave as dynamic systems changing over time, responding to their surroundings, and working together to build complex cellular communities.
By combining cell biology, technology, and synthetic design, the team aims to program what are called “synthoids”—custom-built communities of cells whose behaviors can be manipulated—to test how cells make decisions and organize into tissues.
This foundational understanding we are seeking can really influence how new therapeutics, new medicines are made five years, 10 years down the road.
— Ru Gunawardane, Ph.D., Executive Vice President, Director of Allen Institute for Cell Science
Understanding the building blocks of life
“Cells don’t act alone. They constantly shift and collaborate in ways we’re just beginning to deeply understand,” said Ru Gunawardane, Ph.D., Executive Director and Vice President of the Allen Institute for Cell Science. “With CellScapes, we’re moving beyond the static snapshots of biology and toward a living, dynamic picture of how cells create life.”
CellScapes will describe these changes in mathematical terms to empower researchers to test, model, and predict cell behavior with unprecedented clarity. This critical insight will offer new ways to measure and represent cells that will redefine how we study them.
A boundary-pushing moonshot
“CellScapes is a boundary-pushing moonshot with the potential to change the paradigm in cell biology,” said Rui Costa, D.V.M., Ph.D., President and CEO of the Allen Institute. “The combination of expertise in the area of 3D cellular organization with new imaging methods and new computational frameworks will hopefully reveal principles of how cells organize to form tissues.”
CellScapes will include openly available tools, data, and visualizations for researchers, educators, and students worldwide that could pave the way for breakthroughs in regenerative medicine, cancer research, and personalized therapies.
The future of cell biology
“With CellScapes, we’re going from snapshots to storylines, uncovering rules that govern how cells make decisions, transition states, and form tissues,” Gunawardane said. “This is the future of cell biology. We’re not just observing what life does—we’re starting to understand how and why it works.”