Oldridge Lab - Translational spatial biology in human health and disease

Our lab studies the intricate spatial biology of intact tissues, combining cutting-edge spatialomic techniques with advanced computational, statistical, and AI-driven analytic methods. We use these approaches to deeply profile tissues with hundreds to thousands of molecular markers in a spatially detailed manner, in order to better understand the molecular, cellular, and structural basis of human health and disease.

Our primary scientific focus is to study tumor-immune interactions in the microenvironment of brain tumors as a basis for improving immunotherapies for deadly and difficult to treat cancers. Additionally, our interests extend to studying immunopathology in diverse disease contexts, including other cancers, autoimmune diseases, and transplantation pathology. Our studies span the full spectrum of basic <-> translational <-> clinical research, including pre-clinical animal models as well as human clinical trials.

We further use AI-driven integration of spatialomics with traditional pathology imaging in order to bring spatial biology insights into the clinic. The field of pathology is undergoing a massive digital revolution following FDA approval of digital imaging for primary diagnostics in 2017, unburdening the field of pathology from reliance on physical glass slides. As the first pediatric hospital to implement full digitization of all pathology imaging in 2019, and with hundreds of thousands of tissue images scanned to date, we are uniquely situated at CHOP to bring computational and AI analysis of tissue images into the clinical domain.