Let's get behind this amazing collaboration between @XboxANZ @Xbox @CureCancerAu to raise vital funds for early career cancer researchers @UQMedicine @UQ_News @TRI_info @Qld_SBC! 💪❤️ #GamingForACure #CancerResearch #MakingADifference 🎮🔬👩‍🔬

🔥 In our new BioRxiv preprint we show how cancer cell adaptations along a proliferation–robustness axis drive TME pro-tumor phenotypes. In this work, we asked whether cancer cell states are a result of a physiological response or adaptation to their microenvironment? To study this, we performed long-term (36 weeks) co-culture experiments with cancer cells evolving alongside continuously replenished fibroblasts or macrophages. This allowed us to distinguish between adaptive and physiological responses in specific cancer-TME interactions, which we then also recapitulated in patient tumors. We found that co-culture with fibroblasts induced the epithelial-mesenchymal transition in cancer cells and resulted in their increased drug tolerance, while co-culture with macrophages promoted stress, hypoxia responses and enhanced tumorigenicity. Adaptations were recurrent and partially reversible, but could not be explained by clonal selection, suggesting a dynamic non-mutational process. Moreover, adapted cancer cells elicited cell state changes in the fibroblasts and macrophages consistent with an extended phenotype mode of cancer evolution. Tremendous work by postdoctoral fellow Dr. Maayan Pour! biorxiv.org/content/10.64898…

Excited to share CellBridge, our new preprint led by @sevdoche in collaboration with @pafrossard and @DorinaThanou at @EPFL_en! 🔬 Looking at an H&E slide, we can learn a remarkable amount about a tissue: its architecture, the cells within it, and how they interact. But identifying exactly which cells are present can be harder. A lymphocyte may be recognisable, while telling whether it is a T cell or a B cell often requires additional markers. Spatial transcriptomics provides that molecular detail by measuring gene expression in individual cells. But it is much harder to obtain routinely than an H&E slide. Could we use these molecular measurements to teach an image model more about cell identity and help it recognise when appearance alone is not enough? This is the idea behind CellBridge. We trained CellBridge on millions of cells with paired H&E images and Xenium spatial transcriptomic profiles. During training, the model learns to connect each cell’s appearance with its molecular identity. Once trained, it predicts cell types from H&E images alone. Across our benchmarks, CellBridge improved fine-grained cell classification over leading pathology models, with gains of up to 16 percentage points in macro F1. But better classification is only part of the story. Some biologically important distinctions remain difficult to resolve from an image. Our Cell-Ontology-Fallback (COF) module lets the model adjust how specific its answer should be. For example, when the evidence does not support distinguishing a T cell from a B cell, it can report “lymphocyte” rather than commit to an uncertain subtype. COF combines the biological relationships in the Cell Ontology with branch-calibrated conformal prediction to make these decisions. What excites me is the possibility of extracting more cellular detail from routinely available slides while making clearer where additional molecular measurements are still needed. 🎥 Our 1-minute video walks through the idea. Jointly supervised by @pafrossard, @DorinaThanou, and me. A huge thank you to our co-authors: @arpitdm, @AmirhVahidi, Dabin Jeong, @SebastianBirk_, Adam Boxall, @Adib_m_, Marta Rosa Sallese, and Yinshui Chang. 📄 Preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.64898… 💻 Code: github.com/Lotfollahi-lab/ce… 📓 Tutorial: github.com/Lotfollahi-lab/ce… #ComputationalPathology #SpatialOmics #CellTypeAnnotation #MultimodalLearnin

The NHMRC Science to Art Award celebrates outstanding research images that inspire curiosity and showcase the power of discovery such as the 2025 winner, @aruthak of the Frazer Institute at @UQ_News. Submit your nomination for the 2027 Science to Art Award on our website: ow.ly/8cLA50ZUMqU #NHMRC #NHMRCFunding #BuildingAHealthyAustralia #BiennialAwards #NHMRCBiennialAwards

“It’s been a journey” Shroff told @NBCNews. “I’ve spent my entire life trying to eradicate cancer, primarily pancreatic cancer, but also liver cancers.” nbcnews.com/health/disease/r… An homage to Rachna Shroff, including thoughts from her family. Please read, share & honor her memory.

Many longevity founders ask me what I would be working on if not for DNA damage. Lipid elongation, the topic of a newly published paper, would be towards the top of that list. I first became interested in this when I was working on something very different: epigenetic clocks

Beautiful family and science moment. Congrats @KarlDeisseroth @michelle_monje and everyone who supported them!

Wow! multiple sclerosis is caused by viral reactivation in monocytes and B cells months before clinical onset. nature.com/articles/s41591-0…

Explore #SpatialTranscriptomics and #DigitalPathology at #HCA2026Asia. Hae Ock Lee, @aruthak, Yuejiao Li, @kawajihideya, @Quan_Nguyen_UQ, Vaibhao Janbandhu & @Yutaka Suzuki. 🧬Development • Cancer • Cardiovascular disease • AI pathology Register now: tinyurl.com/2b6rcst4

Congratulations to @aruthak, Scientific Director of the @Qld_SBC, and The Brazil Family Chair of Spatial Medicine, on receiving the Game Changer Award at the @theindaily 40 Under 40 Awards last night for his contributions to #medicalresearch. 👉 wri.org.au/4gW0CEr

Congratulations to A/Prof Arutha Kulasinghe @aruthak, Scientific Director of the @Qld_SBC and The Brazil Family Chair in Spatial Medicine, for winning the @ResAustralia UNSW Frontiers Award for the Cancer Blueprint Project. 👉wri.org.au/4gmi7MF @UQ_News #medicalresearch

An AI biologist augmented discovery of disease mechanisms and targets for drug treatment. Working autonomously, trained with >24 million publications and >600TB of biomedical data @natBME nature.com/articles/s41551-0…

Members of WRI and UQ gathered for a lunch celebrating the establishment of The Brazil Family Chair in Spatial Medicine, a philanthropically funded research leadership position appointed to A/Prof Arutha Kulasinghe @aruthak. @uqnews 👉Read more at wri.org.au/4fVctCa

The intriguing role of antibodies to protect us from getting cancer, the foundation for a cancer antibody atlas cell.com/cell/abstract/S0092…

Tertiary lymphoid structures are reservoirs of tumour-specific T cells with stem-like progenitor features that could be leveraged by T cell immunotherapies @Nature nature.com/articles/s41586-0…

Associate Professor Arutha Kulasinghe @aruthak, Chair in Spatial Medicine and Scientific Director of @Qld_SBC has been named a Research Australia’s UNSW Frontier Award Finalist in recognition of his innovative Cancer Blueprint work. 👏 Learn more - piped.video/shorts/o-eLNRd3H…

Agentic AI for Spatial Omics. ift.tt/0vhgru7

nature.com/articles/s41698-0… Dissecting non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) with blood proteomics - from surgical to immunotherapeutic responses

Congratulations to WRI researchers Professor John Fraser AO and Associate Professor Arutha Kulasinghe @aruthak on being named among @couriermail 60 most powerful health figures in #Queensland! @CCRG_Research @Qld_SBC Read more 👉 bit.ly/49YEFRt

Can sleep’s core benefits be delivered without actually sleeping? Scientists induced sleep-like neuronal “off periods” during wakefulness in mice, reducing local sleep pressure, weakening synaptic strength, and even restoring memory consolidation during sleep deprivation. The findings suggest key functions of sleep may depend on specific brain activity patterns rather than sleep itself. #SleepScience #Neuroscience #Memory nature.com/articles/s41593-0…

A GUY AT GOOGLE DEEPMIND MADE AN ISOMETRIC PIXEL-ART MAP OF NEW YORK CITY AND PUT IT ON THE OPEN WEB FOR FREE it's called isometric.nyc you open the tab and the city is just sitting there in classic SimCity 2000 isometric pixel art. you scroll. and it keeps going. and going. i zoomed in on midtown and i could read the H&M signage in times square. in red. as actual pixel-art letters on the side of a building. i could see the crystalline spire of the Bank of America Tower poking out of a clump of skyscrapers. individual rooftop HVAC units. tiny green roof gardens. the little driveway loops in front of the hotels. he estimates the map needs roughly 40,000 tiles. nothing is a placeholder. the guy who made it is Andy Coenen, a senior staff engineer at Google DeepMind. he is not a pixel artist. by his own admission he is "a former electronic musician." what he actually did is kind of insane: > pulled NYC's geometry from the Google Maps 3D tiles API > fine-tuned an open-source image model (Qwen-Image-Edit) on ~40 hand-paired examples of "satellite tile → pixel art tile" > spun up 50 parallel instances on rented GPUs and generated tens of thousands of tiles in a few hours > the fine-tune cost him 12 bucks his own stated mission for the project, verbatim, is one sentence: "what's possible now that was impossible before?" apparently the answer is "one engineer can pixel-art most of a metropolis for the price of a sandwich." and the wildest part to me is he didn't sell it. no signup. no paywall. no NFT. you open the URL and the city is yours to wander. the post landed at 1,325 points on Hacker News and topped bestofshowhn's 2026 list. we live in a timeline where a senior engineer at one of the largest AI labs on earth spent his nights pixel-arting Manhattan for fun and then gave it away. the internet is healing.