Join award-winning independent journalist Miles O’Brien, science correspondent for PBS Newshour, as he dives into how COVID-19 and the evolving coronavirus pandemic may change the way we approach infectious disease research.  He’ll chat with three researchers at the forefront of studying SARS-CoV-2: Chris Mason, PhD Associate Professor, Director, WorldQuant Initiative for Quantitative Prediction, Weill Cornell Medicine, Jim Heath, PhD President and Professor at Institute for Systems Biology, and Peter Mombaerts, MD, PhD, Director of the Department of Molecular Neurogenetics at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics as they discuss the effects of long COVID, efforts to include underrepresented groups and minorities in research studies, and how we can be more prepared in the future for another pandemic.

Learning objectives:

• Describe how the COVID-19 pandemic is pushing scientists to be more inclusive in human trials.
• Explain how COVID-19 impacts the olfactory system.
• Summarize the ways in which scientists are studying long-haul COVID-19.

Join science journalist Neil Canavan, Managing Director, KOL Network at LifeSci Advisors, LLC as he discusses the field of organ transplant and how researchers are trying to prevent rejection.  He’ll chat with Fadi Issa, DPhil FRCS(Plast), Associate Professor of Plastic Surgery; Wellcome Trust Fellow, University of Oxford, Richard Danger, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Nantes, and Michael Mengel, MD, Chair and Medical Director for Laboratory Medicine and Pathology, at the University of Alberta and with Alberta Precision Laboratories Ltd. about the role of expression profiling and spatial transcriptomics in transplant research, the state of the art regarding cellular therapy, and how tissue engineering and regenerative medicine can change the future for organ transplants.

Learning objectives:

• Describe how cellular therapy can be used to prevent or reverse organ rejection.
• Explain how spatial transcriptomics can be used to better understand organ rejection.
• Discuss how regenerative medicine can be used to advance the field of organ transplant.

NanoString Spatial Biology Roadmap: Whole Transcriptome Digital Spatial Profiling and Sub-Cellular Multi-Omic Imaging with the Spatial Molecular Imager

Join NanoString Chief Scientific Officer and Senior VP of RnD Joe Beechem, PhD as he walks through the latest technologies being developed at NanoString for studying the immune response in the context of infectious disease and organ transplantation.  He will discuss, among other things, how spatial transcriptomics and direct, digital expression profiling can be used to study the usage and diversity of T cell receptor variable regions.  Stay tuned for the entire talk to get a sneak peek at how spatial molecular imaging can probe into the private lives of individual cells by profiling 100s to 1000s of transcripts and even proteins.

Learning objectives:

• Explain the concept of spatial biology and how it can be applied to studying disease.  
• Describe how T cell receptor profiling can be done using gene expression analysis in bulk and in space.
• Summarize the differences between a single cell and multicellular spatial profiling platform and how they can be used to study the immune response to disease. 

Spatial Omics for COVID autopsies and Space Biology?

Chris Mason, PhD, Associate Professor; Director, WorldQuant Initiative for Quantitative Prediction, Weill Cornell Medicine takes us on a journey from spatial biology to outer space as he discusses findings from spatial transcriptomics of COVID-19 autopsy samples.  Pivoting quickly during the pandemic to COVID-19 research, Mason and colleagues used the GeoMx® Digital Spatial Profiler to look at the differential expression of genes in COVID-19 lung autopsy samples and compared these results to those from normal lung tissue, lung tissue afflicted with Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS), and lung tissue infected with influenza.  COVID-19 lung samples showed a distinct disruptive pattern of immune cells, with a higher abundance of macrophages, neutrophils, and plasma cells and disrupted co-localization of different immune cell types.  In additional studies with heart, liver, lung, and lymph node tissue from COVID-19 decedents, Mason and colleagues discovered that certain tissues, namely heart, ‘forgot’ their programming and displayed completely aberrant expression profiles when compared to normal tissue, despite appearing visually the same.

Learning objectives:

• Explain the differences seen in COVID-19 lung samples vs. normal samples with respect to the abundance and co-localization of various immune cell types.
• Describe the effect that COVID-19 has on the expression ‘fingerprint’ of heart cells.
• Summarize how the complement system is affected by COVID-19