Researchers Chart the Contents of Human Bone Marrow
Discovery
A team at Weill Cornell Medicine has mapped the location and spatial features of blood-forming cells within human bone marrow. Their findings confirm hypotheses about the anatomy of this tissue and provide a powerful new means to study diseases ranging from noncancerous conditions, such as sickle cell anemia, to malignant conditions, such as acute leukemia, that affect bone marrow.
For the research described Sept. 29 in Blood, the investigators retrieved deidentified archival bone marrow samples from 29 patients at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, generating a vast amount of data about the spatial relationships among the samples’ contents.
Creating images of bone marrow has been difficult historically, according to senior author Dr. Sanjay Patel. He and his colleagues overcame these challenges by devising a method for visualizing whole pieces of the tissue, then analyzing them with artificial intelligence (AI).
Making use of the tissue archive within Weill Cornell Medicine’s Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, the team gathered 1-to-2-centimeter-long pieces of tissue from patients who had received biopsies, but who had turned out to be disease-free. Researchers in the MISI lab tested a variety of immune proteins known as antibodies, selecting from a catalog of thoroughly vetted markers used in routine clinical diagnostics to see which most effectively tagged the contents of bone marrow to make them visible with their fluorescence-based imaging instrumentation.
Collaborators at BostonGene Corp., a medical bioinformatics company, used AI to analyze the resulting images, picking out individual cells. This technology allowed the team to wrangle an otherwise unmanageable amount of information into a sophisticated analysis, according to Dr. Patel.
“We have been able to apply our approach to archival samples in a way that wasn’t possible before,” says Dr. Patel, who noted that they succeeded in identifying and determining the positions of about 1.5 million cells in all.
While Dr. Patel expects the findings to contribute to scientists’ understanding of normal bone marrow, he sees the new method’s greatest potential in investigating diseases, particularly along the course of their evolution. For a few conditions, such as acute myeloid leukemia, researchers already have evidence that the spatial arrangement of stem and progenitor cells may be disrupted. This new method could open the door to studies that specifically explore such changes — and to those testing new treatments and evaluating existing ones, according to Dr. Patel.
“I hope our work unlocks the imagination of people who study diseases related to the bone marrow,” he says.
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