Researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) have developed a new open-source computational method, dubbed Spectra, which improves the analysis of single-cell transcriptomic data. Spectra can offer new insights into the complex interplay between cells, like the interactions between cancer cells and immune cells, which are critical to improving immunotherapy treatments.
Spectra can cut through technical “noise” to identify functionally relevant gene expression programs, including those that are novel or highly specific to a particular biological context. It is also well suited to study data from large patient cohorts and to suss out clinically meaningful patient characteristics.
The MSK team has made Spectra freely available to researchers around the world, in the hope that it will be used to make many new biological discoveries.
