Jonathan Weissman

The human body begins as a single cell, a fertilized egg, that divides and divides to create all of the body’s cells. A huge effort in biology has been to trace processes including embryonic development, cancer evolution, and disease spread from the originating cells to later stages in order to understand how these processes occur and the biological mechanisms involved.

Our lab is developing tools that can map a family tree of cell divisions and simultaneously collect contextual information, revealing a detailed history of such biological processes. Recently, we used our tools to reconstruct the history of tumors within mouse lungs. We combined the cellular family tree with spatial information captured through imaging, so we could see how cells were related, where they were in the lung, who their neighbors were, and what signals they received.

We found that tumor cells’ characteristics depended on where they were physically. For example, cells closest to lung tissue evolved traits that made them more aggressive. We also identified some of the factors driving that change.

In the future, we plan to use similar approaches to understand how tumors initiate and spread and how the immune system can be used to attack them. The data we collect will also provide unique training sets for AI efforts to create virtual models of tumor development.