SingHealth Duke-NUS launches $6m platform to advance disease research

It aims to identify targets for lab-developed diagnostic tests.

SingHealth Duke-NUS Academic Medical Centre (AMC) has launched Spatial Profiling and Disease Exploration (SPADE), a cross-institutional research platform backed by a $6m grant from the SingHealth Joint Office of Academic Medicine.

The platform aims to identify targets for lab-developed diagnostic tests and to form partnerships between clinical researchers and industry to bring those findings to patients.

SPADE will pool clinical, pathology and computational expertise across the AMC to study how diseases develop and why patients respond differently to the same treatment.

Longer term, SPADE aims to enable multiple diagnostic tests on a single tissue sample, reducing repeat biopsies, and to identify several drug targets at once.

It also plans to build a spatial tissue atlas, a molecular map of human tissues, to train artificial intelligence models and simulate disease behaviour.

The platform is led by the National Cancer Centre Singapore and co-led by Singapore General Hospital and Duke-NUS Medical School.