VCU Massey Leads Global Effort on First Digital Oral Atlas

New atlas integrates single-cell sequencing and spatial proteotranscriptomics to unlock insights into fibroblast regulation of structural immunity.

Mar. 24, 2026 at 3:44am

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Researchers at VCU Massey Comprehensive Cancer Center are leading an international study that advances the understanding of the immunoregulatory nature of human tissues, offering breakthrough insights into how fibroblasts serve as the core regulators of structural immunity in the mouth. The findings lay the groundwork for targeted modulation of fibroblast activity in fibrosis, cancer, and autoimmunity.

Why it matters

This first-of-its-kind, AI-driven atlas integrates single-cell and dual-platform spatial proteotranscriptomics, allowing researchers to examine the connections between chronic inflammatory diseases, autoimmune diseases and several cancers to understand if there are unique cancer-targeting opportunities. The atlas and supporting AstroSuite toolkit aim to accelerate discovery and progress in these critical health areas.

The details

The study, published as the cover story in the first issue of Cell Press Blue, was led by Kevin Matthew Byrd, D.D.S., Ph.D., a member of the Cancer Biology research program at Massey and assistant professor at the VCU School of Dentistry, and Jinze Liu, Ph.D., a research member at Massey and professor at the VCU School of Public Health. They describe how fibroblasts, traditionally viewed as structural support cells, also perform important regulatory roles that may be leveraged to improve health outcomes, including cancer. The atlas and AstroSuite toolkit bring together bioinformatics tools to enable scalable, reproducible spatial biology analysis across tissues and disease contexts.

  • The study was published on March 23, 2026.
  • Byrd and Liu debuted the TACIT bioinformatics tool last year in Nature Communications.

The players

Kevin Matthew Byrd

A member of the Cancer Biology research program at VCU Massey Comprehensive Cancer Center and assistant professor of oral and craniofacial molecular biology at the VCU School of Dentistry.

Jinze Liu

A research member at VCU Massey Comprehensive Cancer Center and professor in the Department of Biostatistics at the VCU School of Public Health.

VCU Massey Comprehensive Cancer Center

A leading cancer research and treatment center in Richmond, Virginia.

Cell Press Blue

A new scientific journal that published the cover story on this research.

AstroSuite

An AI-enabled toolkit providing an interoperable computational framework for integrated single-cell and spatial analysis, developed by Byrd and Liu.

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What they’re saying

“We think this is actually a really important feature for the rest of life. Based on some studies, by 2030, about 30-40% of all human deaths will be linked to fibrosis.”

— Kevin Matthew Byrd

“We started off with this single-cell sequencing approach, but, in parallel, also employed mspatial-multiomic sequencing approaches. AstroSuite became an essential technology where we were stacking technologies on top of one another, allowing us to map in distinct clusters in ways that we couldn't see through one technology alone.”

— Kevin Matthew Byrd

What’s next

The atlas and AstroSuite toolkit are being made publicly available to the scientific community to accelerate further discovery and progress in understanding the role of fibroblasts in chronic inflammatory diseases, autoimmune diseases, and cancer.

The takeaway

This groundbreaking research led by VCU Massey provides a powerful new tool to unlock insights into the immunoregulatory functions of fibroblasts, paving the way for targeted therapies to address a wide range of critical health challenges including fibrosis, cancer, and autoimmunity.