Nicheformer: a foundation model for single-cell and spatial omics

Tissue makeup and the corresponding orchestration of vital biological activities, ranging from development and differentiation to immune response and regeneration, rely fundamentally on the cellular microenvironment and the interactions between cells. Spatial single-cell genomics allows probing such interactions in an unbiased and, increasingly, scalable fashion. To learn a unified cell representation that accounts for local dependencies in the cellular microenvironment and the underlying cell interactions, we propose to generalize recent foundation modeling approaches for disassociated single-cell transcriptomics to the spatial omics setting.