Spatial multi-omics: novel tools to study the complexity of cardiovascular diseases

Abstract Spatial multi-omic studies have emerged as a promising approach to comprehensively analyze cells in tissues, enabling the joint analysis of multiple data modalities like transcriptome, epigenome, proteome, and metabolome in parallel or even the same tissue section. This review focuses on the recent advancements in spatial multi-omics technologies, including novel data modalities and computational approaches. We discuss the advancements in low-resolution and high-resolution spatial multi-omics methods which can resolve up to 10,000 of individual molecules at subcellular level. By applying and integrating these techniques, researchers have recently gained valuable insights into the molecular circuits and mechanisms which govern cell biology along the cardiovascular disease spectrum. We provide an overview of current data analysis approaches, with a focus on data integration of multi-omic datasets, highlighting strengths and weaknesses of various computational pipelines. These tools play a crucial role in analyzing and interpreting spatial multi-omics datasets, facilitating the discovery of new findings, and enhancing translational cardiovascular research. Despite nontrivial challenges, such as the need for standardization of experimental setups, data analysis, and improved computational tools, the application of spatial multi-omics holds tremendous potential in revolutionizing our understanding of human disease processes and the identification of novel biomarkers and therapeutic targets. Exciting opportunities lie ahead for the spatial multi-omics field and will likely contribute to the advancement of personalized medicine for cardiovascular diseases.