The BD Multiomics Alliance – Part 3: A Game Changer for Cell Research

The BD Multiomics Alliance was initiated in 2019. It is made up of seven leading academic researchers from across Europe. At its kick-off meeting, a couple of the seven alliance members shared their vision and expectations. Now, 3 years later, three of the researchers have taken part in the final installment of this three-part mini-series.

How Multiomics is changing cell research

According to Prof. Susan Schlenner at KU Leuven in Belgium, the BD Rhapsody™ Single-Cell Analysis System and BD AbSeq® technology allowed her team to accelerate research on regulatory T cells. They discovered new subsets, as well as new correlations between them. These discoveries have led to further research on the origin of  unstable regulatory T cells.

For Dr. Andrew Filby at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom, in order to know which cells are pathogenic, he has to ask a lot of questions. Multiomics and the BD Rhapsody™ Single-Cell Analysis System enable his research team to ask more questions. Multiomics represents a paradigm shift for him as a cytometrist. He thinks it’s the way forward. It gives researchers confirmation in a single cell because they’re able to correlate gene expression levels at the messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) level and the protein level in parallel.

Future cell research with Multiomics

Prof. Schlenner plans to perform clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) and CRISPR-associated proteins (CRISPR-Cas) screens on the BD Rhapsody™ Single-Cell Analysis System to better understand the impact of RNA modifications on T-cell biology.

Using data from the BD Rhapsody™ Single-Cell Analysis System, Dr. Filby’s team will focus on the important questions raised by the Multiomics approach as described above. Then, they will will leverage their insights from the Multiomics project to establish a new flow cytometry panel. Among others projects, they’re analysing COVID-19 samples to see whether this approach can uncover aggressive or protective immune signatures in different patient groups.

Prof. Orla Sheils at the Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland feels that the pilot study and initial work with the BD Multiomics Alliance are a stong foundation on which her team is going to build a new body of research. They’ll be analysing samples from COVID-19 patients. They’ll use the same strategy, the same combinatorial phenotype and proteome and transcriptome analyses. Their goal is to try to identify patients who have better or poorer outcomes and understand the reasons why.

In this, the final video of a series of three videos, the researchers speak about their labs and their research, what they have gained from their collaboration with the BD Multiomics Alliance and what they think of it.

Watch the video, and visit the alliance landing page here.