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<\/p>\nSingle-cell and spatial technologies are giving researchers an unprecedented view of how brain diseases like Alzheimer\u2019s really work. The result? Faster discovery, clearer targets and a new path towards more effective treatments.<\/p>\n
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Neurological diseases are among the most complex and least understood conditions in medicine. Despite the knowledge that certain genes increase the risk of contracting diseases like Alzheimer\u2019s and Parkinson\u2019s, it is still not fully understood how those diseases develop in the brain. But that is beginning to change.<\/p>\n
At the centre of this shift is 10x Genomics<\/a> \u2013 a company building tools that enable researchers to study individual cells and their gene activity, both in isolation and in their original spatial context. These technologies are now being used in labs around the world to explore how the brain functions \u2013 and what changes occur when it begins to break down.<\/p>\n Michael Schnall-Levin, Chief Technology Officer and founding scientist at 10x Genomics, has seen this transformation up close. \u201cOur mission as a company is to build the most impactful technologies that allow researchers and drug developers to understand underlying biology and ultimately use that to impact human health,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n It matters because it is helping scientists identify new therapeutic targets, track disease progression at the cellular level and test how experimental drugs affect specific brain cell types.<\/p>\n From maths and physics to molecular biology<\/p>\n Schnall-Levin did not begin in the life sciences. \u201cI did physics and math as an undergraduate,\u201d he explains. But during his PhD in applied mathematics, his focus began to shift. \u201cI started looking around and getting interested in biology. I got my eyes opened to molecular biology, bioinformatics, computational biology and these emerging fields at the time.\u201d<\/p>\n That turning point led to a postdoctoral position at the Broad Institute with Dr Eric Lander, Founding Director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Schnall-Levin also took on an early role at Foundation Medicine \u2013 one of the first cancer genomics companies. \u201cI took a couple of other software startup opportunities,\u201d he adds, \u201cbut I realised I missed the genomics and science. That\u2019s when I joined 10x.\u201d<\/p>\n What 10x has built<\/p>\n 10x\u2019s platforms \u2013 Chromium, Visium and Xenium \u2013 are all designed to study biology at cellular resolution, but each does so in a different way.<\/p>\n Chromium enables single-cell analysis, allowing researchers to profile gene expression or chromatin accessibility in thousands of individual cells from a tissue sample. Visium adds spatial context by mapping gene activity across a tissue section, showing where different cell types are located and how they interact. Xenium takes this further with in situ analysis at subcellular resolution, detecting RNA and protein molecules directly within tissues using high-resolution imaging. Together, these tools give researchers a detailed view of how cells behave, where they are and how they contribute to health or disease.<\/p>\n There are known genetic mutations that are linked to a higher risk of developing Alzheimer\u2019s or to a worse prognosis.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are known genetic mutations that are linked to a higher risk of developing Alzheimer\u2019s or to a worse prognosis,\u201d Schnall-Levin explains. \u201cBut with our technologies, what you can do is take people who have those different genetics and look at their cells \u2013 either spatially or individually \u2013 and understand what is actually happening in some of those patients at the molecular level.\u201d<\/p>\n In neurological disease research, this level of analysis matters. \u201cEven when people talk about glial cells \u2013 you might just say, OK, they\u2019re glial cells \u2013 but there are actually many different subtypes, and those subtypes can be doing different things in people who are healthy compared to those with a disease.\u201d Schnall-Levin continues, \u201cwhat our technologies allow you to do in situations like this is really understand at the most fundamental level what\u2019s actually happening and how that\u2019s going to drive disease.\u201d<\/p>\n This kind of insight is what moves research beyond correlation. It helps scientists pinpoint what is actually causing disease \u2013 and more importantly, how to stop it.<\/p>\n Xenium analysis of wild-type (WT) and TgCRND8 mice across multiple time points reveals age-associated enrichment of activated glial populations. Green: disease-associated astrocytes; pink: disease-associated microglia. Image courtesy of 10x Genomics.<\/p>\n A growing body of evidence<\/p>\n \u201cWe just passed 10,000 publications in total that have used our technology in some way or another,\u201d Schnall-Levin says. This is a major milestone and signals how quickly the field is evolving.<\/p>\n \u201cSome of these 10x technologies have only been released in the last five years or even the last couple of years,\u201d he adds. \u201cIt just shows how impactful they are.\u201d<\/p>\n The applications are wide-ranging, but the momentum in neurological research is particularly notable. Researchers are using 10x platforms to identify molecular targets, understand disease heterogeneity and, in some cases, explore how different cell populations respond to drugs in preclinical models.<\/p>\n How AI fits in<\/p>\n Artificial intelligence (AI) is also beginning to play a larger role across 10x\u2019s product portfolio. \u201cThe first area where we have done this in the most substantial way is in our spatial technology platform,\u201d says Schnall-Levin.<\/p>\n When a customer uses those platforms, they use these AI tools to automatically annotate the entire image and identify where all the cells are.<\/p>\n One example is cell segmentation \u2013 identifying individual cells in tissue images. 10x has trained AI models on manually annotated datasets to automate this process in its software. \u201cWhen a customer uses those platforms, they use these AI tools to automatically annotate the entire image and identify where all the cells are.\u201d<\/p>\n The company is also integrating AI to make data analysis more accessible and less time-consuming. \u201cWe\u2019re starting to look at building AI into our products to help researchers analyse their data and automate that process, to quickly incorporate information from the entire literature or pull together different analysis tools,\u201d Schnall-Levin explains. And larger ventures are also under way: \u201cThere have been quite a few efforts now \u2013 like the Billion Cells Project with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) , and the Arc Institute just announced the Virtual Cell Atlas which is using our technology \u2013 where the goal is to build AI on top of those datasets.\u201d<\/p>\n The Billion Cells Project refers to a global initiative aiming to map gene expression across one billion individual cells, creating reference datasets to advance AI-driven insights into health and disease. Separately, the Arc Institute \u2013 a nonprofit research organisation focused on accelerating scientific progress and understanding the root causes of complex diseases \u2013 is using 10x platforms to generate large-scale perturbational single-cell datasets designed to support the development of predictive \u201cvirtual cell\u201d models. The goal is to deepen their understanding of health and disease and accelerate therapeutic discovery.<\/p>\n In practice, this means that researchers could soon move from raw data to actionable biological insights in a fraction of the time. Instead of manually stitching together datasets, literature references and custom pipelines, scientists could rely on trained AI models to flag meaningful patterns, suggest targets or even predict responses \u2013 potentially accelerating early-stage discovery and reducing bottlenecks in the drug development process.<\/p>\n From discovery to therapy<\/p>\n Schnall-Levin believes the industry is edging closer to real-world therapies that will be directly traceable to single-cell and spatial analysis.<\/p>\n \u201cI think some of the breakthroughs that we\u2019re really excited about are from people who are starting to tease apart the underlying molecular mechanisms of diseases like Alzheimer\u2019s and Parkinson\u2019s\u2026 and these are now really suggesting better ways to treat these diseases and develop new drug candidates.\u201d<\/p>\n For 10x, the next major milestone will not be about tools \u2013 it will be about outcomes. \u201cA really exciting milestone that I would expect to see \u2013 and would be really excited to see \u2013 would be new therapies coming out for some of these neurological diseases that trace directly back to an understanding that was driven from the single-cell or spatial.\u201d<\/p>\n What comes next<\/p>\n 10x will continue to develop and expand its product platforms while supporting researchers with images, datasets and visualisations to make their findings more interpretable and reproducible.<\/p>\n \u201cSometimes I think just seeing the latest images from our data \u2013 it really hits you how powerful it is,\u201d Schnall-Levin says.<\/p>\n The combination of high-resolution tools, large-scale data and AI is shaping the future of neurological disease research. The hope is that, within the next few years, the first wave of therapies to emerge from this work will start to make their way into the clinic.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Publications using these technologies:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Michael Schnall-Levin has been at the company since its inception and today serves as Chief Technology Officer. Before joining 10x Genomics, Michael was a NSF postdoctoral fellow with Eric Lander at the Broad Institute, where he worked on developing novel applications of DNA sequencing technologies. Prior to that, Michael worked at Foundation Medicine, where he developed some of the early algorithms to accurately detect mutations in patient tumour samples. Michael earned his PhD in Mathematics from MIT with Bonnie Berger, where he was both a Hertz fellow and NDSEG fellow, and his B.A. in Physics from Harvard College.<\/p>\n Related topics![\".](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Picture2_10x-344x500.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Michael_headshot\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Michael_headshot-120x120.jpg\")
Meet Michael Schnall-Levin<\/p>\n
Analysis<\/a>, Artificial Intelligence<\/a>, Assays<\/a>, Bioinformatics<\/a>, Computational techniques<\/a>, Disease Research<\/a>, Drug Discovery<\/a>, Drug Discovery Processes<\/a>, Genetic Analysis<\/a>, Genomics<\/a>, Imaging<\/a>, Machine learning<\/a>, microglial cells<\/a>, Molecular Biology<\/a>, Neurons<\/a>, Neurosciences<\/a>, Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS)<\/a>, Precision Medicine<\/a>, Sequencing<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Single-cell and spatial technologies are giving researchers an unprecedented view of how brain diseases like Alzheimer\u2019s really work.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1204,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[200,79],"class_list":["post-1203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-genetics","tag-genetics","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1203"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1203\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}