MUNICH & SEATTLE -- Helmholtz Munich and Parse Biosciences announced a strategic partnership to generate the world’s broadest lung disease perturbation atlas, powered by Parse Biosciences’ GigaLab platform. Using a human lung ex-vivo tissue slice culture model from normal control donor lungs as well as explant lung tissues from patients with chronic lung disease, the study aims to identify novel targets and cell circuits in lung health and disease by characterizing disease-specific responses of cells to 900 pharmacological interventions.

Prof Herbert Schiller, Director of Helmholtz Munich’s Precision Regenerative Medicine Research Unit, and a leading researcher on lung biology and disease, will head this ambitious initiative.

“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.

Prof Fabian Theis, who heads Helmholtz Munich’s Computational Health Center, adds, “To build foundational AI models of cell and tissue biology we are in urgent need for more high quality perturbation data - such a complex drug perturbation dataset will enable meaningful progress towards understanding gene regulation in lung health and disease.”

This initiative will be run through the Parse GigaLab, a state-of-the-art facility purpose-built for the generation of massive-scale single cell RNA sequencing datasets. Leveraging Parse’s Evercode chemistry, the GigaLab rapidly produces large single cell datasets with exceptional quality.

“With GigaLab, we’re enabling researchers to move past incremental discoveries,” states Charlie Roco, PhD, 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.”