Imaging Receptomics as a tool for biomedical discovery

Targeting cell surface proteins to alter cellular behavior is a major aim of many therapeutics.

Recently approved immunotherapeutic drugs trigger anti-tumor immunity by disrupting key cell surface proteins that guide immune cell interactions.

Despite the cell surface representing a major site of drug action, its nanoscale organization remains poorly characterized.

The main reason for this is largely due to technical limitations of current fluorescence and super-resolution imaging approaches, which do not allow high-throughput measurements of the spatial localization and interaction of hundreds of proteins with true single-protein- resolution on cell surfaces.

We here propose to develop exactly such a disruptive capability by advancing recently developed DNA-PAINT microscopy to enable the visualization and quantification of all relevant cell surface proteins at single-protein-resolution.

We will achieve this by innovating DNA-PAINT to enable isotropic 1-nm-resolution, develop DNA-based protein binders against all cell surface proteins, and devise multiplexing capabilities to resolve them with single-protein-resolution over large fields of view, reaching the ultimate goal of enabling Imaging Receptomics.

We will then apply this to test the central hypothesis that surface protein architecture and patterning on immune and tumor cells dictates the outcome of their interactions.

We will map the nanoscale organization of hundreds of key immunomodulatory surface proteins and their corresponding ligands on key interacting pairs of immune cells relevant to current immunotherapy approaches (dendritic cells and T cells), as well as tumor cells.

This will yield fundamental insights into the molecular architecture of their interactions and potentially enable the future development of more refined “pattern”-based immunotherapeutics.

Collectively, this highly multidisciplinary and novel approach has the potential to be ground-breaking across a range of research fields.