Whole Tumour Histology and Spatial transcriptomics for brain tumours in the Indian population
Principal Investigator
Prof. Mohanshankar Sivaprakasam
Objective
- We propose the first large-scale, multi-centre programme to integrate whole-tumour histological imaging with high-resolution spatial transcriptomics on brain tumour specimens from the Indian patient population.
Description
- Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IITM), the top ranked premier technology institution in India, recently launched its cutting-edge Brain Centre to power a large-scale multi-disciplinary effort in the fields of science, technology, computing and medicine to map human brains at cellular level. The Centre has developed a world-class high-throughput histology pipeline that processes whole human brains into high-resolution digital images at petabyte-scale. This is the first time such large scale human brain maps have been generated at this resolution across the entire brain. The Centre is driven by 15+ IITM faculty and 100+ research staff.
Impact
- In population science, it will determine for the first time whether the spatial architecture of brain tumours in Indian patients mirrors or diverges from Western models — knowledge. In clinical diagnostics, deep learning models that infer molecular states from H&E slides will provide a transformative, low-cost diagnostic tool for the thousands of pathology centres across India. In therapeutic strategy, India-specific spatial maps of the tumour microenvironment will enable the design of clinical trials.