Diana Turner explores how Nature’s 2024 ‘Method of the Year’ is transforming our understanding of cancer. 

 

Invented in the early 2000s, spatial biology is a technique revealing unique insights into biomolecules and how they interact within their cellular and tissue architecture. As a result, and as technologies advance in accuracy, there is increasing industry interest and adoption for uses of spatial biology in drug discovery and development. Researchers can now produce high-throughput multiplex images that detect dozens or even hundreds of biomarkers at once without losing spatial resolution. In the next evolution of the technology, spatial transcriptomics and proteomics blend spatial data with genomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic information to advance our understanding of diseases, particularly the interaction of biomolecules within the tumour microenvironment, opening the possibility of more effective treatments for cancer. 

The spatial biology market

Market intelligence company DeciBio predicts that the spatial biology market will reach $970 million in 2025 and that it will grow 19% per year in the next five years, to reach $2.37 billion by 2030 (1). They expect moderate growth in the near term due to macroeconomic and funding challenges, followed by expansion in use by biopharma and CROs, particularly for use within clinical trials. The companies leading in this market include 10x Genomics, Bruker, Akoya, and Bio-Techne, making up ~60% of the market, however, multiple other smaller-sized players like Hamamatsu, Leica Microsystems, NeoGenomics, and Vizgen are increasingly taking an important role. 

Looking specifically at the global spatial transcriptomics market, Precedence Research expects the value to increase from $469.36 million in 2025 to approximately $1,569.03 million by 2034, expanding at a CAGR of 14.35% (2). The increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) will be a major driver for the spatial biology market by enabling more efficient data analysis, improving spatial resolution, and facilitating integrated analysis of multi-omics datasets. 

The last few years have seen significant investment in spatial biology technologies by biotech, biopharma and academia, signifying its growing importance as demand for more accurate single cell analysis and ever-expanding data pools drives drug discovery. Venture funding was high for companies in this sector in 2024, with Nucleai raising $14 million, RareCyte securing $20 million, Waypoint Bio launching with $14.5 million, and Noetik closing a $40 million Series A financing round. The summer of 2025 saw several shifts in the market, including 10x Genomics’ acquisition of single cell analysis technology company Scale Biosciences, biomarker company Quanterix Corporation’s buyout of spatial biology leader Akoya Biosciences, and spatial multi-omics platform company Stellaromics fundraise of $80 million in a Series B Funding. 

How spatial biology is advancing drug discovery

Noetik is a start-up biotech company using machine learning and high-throughput spatial data to develop cancer therapeutics. The company’s platform pairs human multimodal spatial omics data purpose-built for machine learning with a multiplexed in vivo CRISPR perturbation platform (Perturb-Map) to power its discovery efforts. Ron Alfa, CEO & Co-founder at Noetik, explains the approach: “At Noetik we are generating a massive atlas of spatial and molecular data from human tumours designed up front to train foundation models with the potential to unlock the complexity of tumour immune biology. We think the future of cancer immunotherapy is going to look a lot more like the current state of targeted therapeutics where we understand different types of cancers to be driven by specific immune signatures. In this future, physicians are able to profile tumours using state of the art immune profiling methods to deploy a diversity of therapeutics that can be matched to the right patients.” 

In academia, there are a number of research groups focused on these techniques. The Spatial Biology Network at King’s College, London is a cross-faculty research interest group that brings together researchers from various disciplines, ranging from technology development and molecular biology, to bioinformatics and clinical translational research, to explore the complexity of spatial biology.  

The Francis Crick Institute in London is another institution taking a strong lead on spatial biology analysis for medical research. In a study published in Cancer Cell, Crick researchers used spatial transcriptomics to understand why immunotherapy only works for certain people with bowel cancer (3). Using the technology, they observed that T cells stimulated nearby macrophages and tumour cells to produce protein CD74 and that tumours that were responding to immunotherapy drugs produced higher levels of CD74. People who responded to immunotherapy had significantly higher levels of CD74 than those who did not respond. Kalum Clayton, former postdoc at the Crick and joint first author, comments: “Our work shows how state-of-the-art technologies coupled with computational analysis can address important clinical questions. As an early career research scientist, seeing the potential of our work to provide benefit to patients and their families is greatly rewarding.” 

The Crick is also employing advanced spatial biology techniques in the TRACERx Renal study, which aims to uncover the evolutionary pathways and genetic dependencies that are crucial for the progression and resistance of clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC). The study utilises spatially resolved evaluations of genetically distinct cancer cell populations within their native tumour microenvironment, with a focus on analysing the tumour transcriptome, histology and employing advanced spatial biology techniques. 

In 2024, researchers at New York’s Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai used spatial genomics technology to discover a way that ovarian cancer tumours manipulate their environment to resist immunotherapy and identified a drug target that could overcome that resistance (4). The researchers found that ovarian cancer cells produce a molecule called Interleukin-4 (IL-4), which is typically associated with asthma and the skin condition eczema, also known as atopic dermatitis. The study went on to find that the cancer cells used IL-4 to create a protective environment that kept away killer immune cells, making the tumours resistant to immunotherapy. A drug, dupilumab, which blocks IL-4’s activity, has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and is already used to treat asthma and eczema. The study revealed that dupilumab or similar drugs could be repurposed to enhance immunotherapy for ovarian cancer. 

Overcoming the challenges of spatial data

The evolution of spatial omics technologies is creating new opportunities within drug discovery but is also bringing unique challenges. One such challenge is the management and storage of these diverse datasets to allow comprehensive analysis. A new tool developed by the Stegle Group from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) Heidelberg and the German Cancer Research Centre (DKFZ) hopes to overcome this by integrating different forms of spatial data (5). SpatialData, a data standard and software framework, allows scientists to represent data from a wide range of spatial omics technologies in a unified manner. The team used the SpatialData framework to successfully reanalyse a multimodal breast cancer dataset from a variety of spatial omics technologies as a proof of concept. 

“We have conducted our research and technological development keeping the benefit for the bigger science community in mind,” says Giovanni Palla, PhD student at the Helmholtz Centre Munich. “We not only established an interdisciplinary collaboration project between research institutes but also worked closely with developers working with different spatial technologies and in different programming languages to address the problem of interoperability. Being published openly, other researchers can now freely use SpatialData to manage their own data and have the opportunity to collaborate across various technologies and research topics.” 

With an open, collaborative approach to understanding the data, and progressively sophisticated technologies and computational analysis methods becoming available, it seems likely that spatial biology, and particularly spatial transcriptomics, will play an increasingly important role in the discovery and development of novel treatments. 

 

References

  1. https://www.decibio.com/product/spatial-biology-market
  2. https://www.precedenceresearch.com/spatial-transcriptomics-market
  3. Acha-Sagredo A, Andrei P, Clayton K, et al. A constitutive interferon-high immunophenotype defines response to immunotherapy in colorectal cancer. Cancer Cell. 2025;43(2):292-307.e7.

  4. Mollaoglu G, Tepper A, Falcomatà C, et al. Ovarian cancer-derived IL-4 promotes immunotherapy resistance. Cell 2024;187(26):7492-7510.e22.

  5. https://www.embl.org/news/science-technology/a-universal-framework-for-spatial-biology/ 

 

From DDW Volume 26 – Issue 4, Fall 2025 – Read the digital issue