Spatial omics is a new generation of technologies that allow scientists to study cells in their original location within tissues (without isolating or moving them from their environment). Just as a city cannot be understood by looking at individual buildings alone, cells do not function in isolation: they depend on their neighbors, on the signals they receive, and on the structures that surround them. Spatial omics preserves this context and shows not only what cells are doing, but where they are and how they interact. This approach is opening new ways to understand complex biological processes and disease mechanisms, particularly in complex diseases such as cancer, neurological disorders, cardiovascular diseases, and immune system dysfunction.
IRB Barcelona is now launching Spain’s first fully integrated Spatial Omics Platform, a new facility that will allow scientists to study cells within their natural environments and understand how they work together to maintain health or drive disease. The platform will strengthen IRB Barcelona’s position, and the Spanish research ecosystem, in the rapidly expanding field of spatial biology, contributing to advances in biomedical research and supporting progress toward precision medicine.
“This initiative is much more than a new technology, it’s a new way of working. The spatial omics platform brings together the expertise of five Core Facilities to deliver a fully integrated workflow from sample to data interpretation. By building this collaborative infrastructure and opening it to the scientific community, IRB Barcelona becomes a reference hub for spatial biology in Spain and beyond,” says Dr. Sílvia Álvarez, Director of Technology Strategy & Core Facilities at IRB Barcelona.
Seeing biology in place: a revolution in understanding life
Imagine looking down on a vibrant city from above: neighbourhoods, buildings, parks, hospitals, roads – each serving a purpose, each connected. Now imagine that city is the human body, built not of concrete, but of cells, genes, and proteins.
Until recently, researchers could count the molecules inside tissues, but they could not determine where they were located. It was like knowing a city has surgeons but not knowing whether they are in hospitals or on the streets. Spatial omics technologies change this. Spatial transcriptomics reveals where gene activity happens within tissues, and spatial proteomics maps where functional proteins are located and how they interact. Together, they provide a spatially resolved map of biological activity: not only what happens inside cells, but precisely where, how, and with whom it happens.
This perspective is transforming how we study cancer, neurodegeneration, infection, ageing and development. It enables scientists to analyse tumour architecture, better understand why some therapies fail, and discover new therapeutic targets with great precision.
A platform built on a legacy of innovation
The launch of this new platform builds on IRB Barcelona’s long-standing commitment to adopting and pioneering advanced research technologies and making them available to the scientific community. Over the past two decades, the Institute became a national and European reference centre for genomic microarrays and has pioneered pico profiling, enabling gene analysis from very few cells. The Institute has also driven innovation in protein analysis through advanced top-down proteomics, and was the first centre in Spain to offer, before its commercial availability, light-sheet microscopy as a service, allowing scientists to image tissues and organs in 3D with remarkable clarity.
Today, IRB Barcelona is again taking a decisive step forward by uniting spatial genomics, spatial proteomics, histopathology, advanced microscopy, and bioinformatics under one coordinated infrastructure. This integrated pipeline will ensure scientific rigour, reproducibility, and high-resolution molecular mapping across tissues and organs, providing capabilities that are currently unique in Spain and still rare internationally.
Multidisciplinary excellence, from data to discovery
The Spatial Omics Platform is a cross-facility initiative with a fully coordinated workflow (from sample preparation to computational analysis) and will allow researchers to obtain comprehensive, spatially resolved molecular data that can be compared and integrated across studies and over time. Advanced computational integration will align transcriptomic, proteomic, and phenotypic layers to build detailed molecular atlases of healthy and diseased tissues.
This initiative reinforces IRB Barcelona’s commitment to excellence, collaboration, and open access to transformative technologies, supporting both fundamental and translational research carried out by scientists from academia, hospitals, and industry.
The new platform has been set up with the support from the Spanish and Catalan governments, Next Generation funds, as well as the Spanish Association Against Cancer, La Caixa Foundation and the BBVA Foundation.
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