SPACE (Spatial Profiling and Annotation Centre of Excellence) is a £5.25 million Cancer Research UK initiative, started in 2024, that makes the spatial biology technologies developed by IMAXT available to other researchers. The Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, including the CAMCEAD group, provides its analysis and computing platform.
Cancer Research UK, Cancer Grand Challenges Phase 2, £5.25 million, 2024
What is SPACE?
SPACE, the Spatial Profiling and Annotation Centre of Excellence, follows on from IMAXT. In 2024 it received £5.25 million from Cancer Research UK, the first award of Cancer Grand Challenges phase two funding. IMAXT developed a set of leading spatial biology technologies, and the purpose of SPACE is to make those tools available to cancer researchers more widely.
SPACE was set up under Professor Greg Hannon (CRUK Cambridge Institute) and is now led by Dr Nicholas Walton and Dr Dario Bressan (University of Cambridge). The Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, where the CAMCEAD group is based, is the analysis and computing hub for SPACE and provides the large-scale data infrastructure and distributed computing experience.
"Thanks to this continued funding from Cancer Grand Challenges, the IMAXT team is now making its data generation and analysis infrastructure available to the scientific community through SPACE."
Professor Greg Hannon, CRUK Cambridge Institute
The role of Cambridge and CAMCEAD
The Institute of Astronomy is one of the two host institutions for SPACE and provides its analysis and computing platform. CAMCEAD contributes its experience of building large data pipelines, running distributed cloud computing on the IRIS National Facility and analysing images with AI, all developed over many years of work on astronomical surveys. That experience is used to process and manage the terabytes of spatial biology data that the SPACE technologies produce.
The collaboration shows that methods from astronomical data science carry over well to biomedical research, and it gives Cambridge an unusual link between the two fields.
Technology platform
SPACE gives access to the full set of multi-omics technologies developed by IMAXT:
Spatial imaging
- STPT (serial two-photon tomography) for 3D imaging of whole organs
- 3D IMC (three-dimensional imaging mass cytometry)
- HiFi (hyperplexed fluorescence imaging)
Molecular profiling
- ExSeq (expansion in situ sequencing)
- MERFISH (spatial transcriptomics)
- DLP+ (whole-genome single-cell sequencing)
- WILD-Seq (single-cell clonal barcoding)
Data and visualisation
- Multi-omics data infrastructure and analysis pipelines
- The Project Theia virtual reality viewer for exploring 3D spatial data in real time
- Spatial proteomics and transcriptomics analysis
- Distributed computing on the IRIS cloud
Get involved
SPACE welcomes collaborations on technology development, data generation, and data management and analysis. You can contact the SPACE team at space_queries@cruk.cam.ac.uk.
Source: Cancer Grand Challenges: SPACE
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