Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center · Harvard Medical School

Grants & support

Material for investigators preparing applications that use the Spatial Technologies Unit: a facilities-and-resources description, the equipment base, the institutional environment, and letters of support.

Facilities & resources

The Spatial Technologies Unit is a Center of Excellence for the Development and Application of Single Cell and Spatial Tissue Profiling at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Harvard Medical School (HMS), established with a capital investment from the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center together with BIDMC and the HMS Initiative for RNA Medicine. The unit occupies more than 3,000 square feet of dedicated wet- and dry-lab infrastructure and hosts a broad base of cutting-edge instruments for spatial transcriptomics and proteomics, single-cell and single-nucleus profiling, super-resolution microscopy, digital pathology, tissue microarray construction, and next-generation sequencing, together with single-cell robotics for automated library preparation. The unit provides investigators with centralized access to these technologies and to expert scientific and computational support, from experimental design through delivered, quality-controlled data.

Equipment

The unit's instrument base is listed in full on the Equipment page. The unit also has access to high-performance computing for the integration and analysis of high-dimensional bulk, single-cell, and spatial datasets.

Environment

BIDMC is a teaching hospital of HMS and ranks among the top independent U.S. teaching hospitals in NIH research funding, hosting an extensive set of core research facilities available to its labs and to the surrounding academic and corporate research community. The unit sits within the Longwood Medical Area - one of the densest biomedical research campuses in the world - and is affiliated with the Department of Pathology at BIDMC, the Cancer Research Institute, the HMS Initiative for RNA Medicine, the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

Grantsmanship

The unit supports grant submissions, sponsored research agreements (SRAs), and manuscript preparation. Providing lead time is preferable, but the team can also act on short notice. Specifically, the unit can:

  • provide a letter of support, a description of the technologies, and a summary of the experiments performed or planned, along with guidance on whether the chosen approaches and the text describing them follow best practice;
  • contribute methods text for the relevant assays;
  • act as a consultant during the design phase, early in a project, to maximize the impact and applicability of spatial and single-cell technologies; and
  • provide data archiving and deposition to standardized repositories (Gene Expression Omnibus / GEO, dbGaP, the European Genome-phenome Archive / EGA, and others).

To request a letter of support or grantsmanship help, contact the unit with the mechanism, the deadline, and a short description of the proposed work.

Acknowledgement

Please acknowledge the Spatial Technologies Unit in publications and applications that use its services. Contact the unit for the current acknowledgement language and citation details.