Helmholtz Munich and Parse Biosciences Partner to Build Largest Human Lung Tissue Perturbation Atlas
Helmholtz Munich and Parse Biosciences have launched a collaboration to generate an atlas of human lung tissue perturbations. The project uses Parse’s GigaLab single-cell sequencing platform to examine how healthy and diseased lung tissues respond to 900 different pharmacological interventions, aiming to map cellular circuits and uncover targets for future therapies.
The initiative centers on ex-vivo lung tissue slice cultures derived both from healthy donor lungs and from patients with chronic lung disease. By measuring drug effects directly in human tissue at single-cell resolution, researchers intend to better understand mechanisms of lung tissue regeneration and to identify disease-specific cellular responses. Helmholtz Munich’s Precision Regenerative Medicine Research Unit, directed by lung biology expert Herbert Schiller, will lead the study, while its Computational Health Center, under Fabian Theis, will apply computational approaches to analyze the large-scale dataset.
Helmholtz Munich, a biomedical research center, focuses on environmentally triggered diseases such as diabetes, obesity, allergies, and chronic lung disorders. It is part of the Helmholtz Association, Germany’s largest scientific organization, which operates 18 research centers and employs more than 43,000 people.
Parse Biosciences, founded out of the University of Washington by Alex Rosenberg and Charles Roco, develops single-cell sequencing technologies designed for large-scale biological research. The Seattle-based company has raised more than $100 million and reports use of its products by around 3,000 research groups worldwide. Its portfolio, including the Evercode Whole Transcriptome kits, which provide reagents and analysis software for scaling single-cell sequencing, and the Trailmaker analysis platform, supports studies ranging from cancer and regenerative medicine to immunology and organ biology.
The experimental platform for the atlas is Parse’s GigaLab, which combines the company’s Evercode chemistry with expanded automation. GigaLab reportedly enables the profiling of more than 10 million cells or nuclei in a single run and is built to handle billions of cells annually.
Parse’s technology has also been used in other large-scale initiatives. In collaboration with Vevo Therapeutics and the Arc Institute, its GigaLab platform supported the creation of Tahoe-100M, an open-source dataset of more than 100 million single-cell profiles capturing cellular responses to over a thousand drug perturbations across multiple cancer cell lines. We previously covered this project in detail in our newsletter Where Tech Meets Bio.
Together, Helmholtz Munich and Parse Biosciences aim to use this infrastructure to build a comprehensive perturbation atlas that can serve as a foundational dataset for AI-driven exploration of lung health and disease, with the longer-term goal of informing precision therapies and regenerative strategies.
Topic: AI in Bio
