Recent technological advances permit the profiling of metabolic changes in single cells, which sheds light on how metabolism regulates immune responses. We advocate for accessible and standardized tools to reduce the barrier of entry to immunometabolism studies and facilitate the translation of fundamental findings towards clinical applications.
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Acknowledgements
We thank INSERM for the ‘Metabolism in the single cell area’ workshop held in Bordeaux from 20 to 22 September 2023, organized by L.P, J.C., A.M. and R.J.A., which enabled the launch of the initiative that underpins this Comment. I.Z. is supported by NIH grants 2R01AI121066, 2R01DK115217, 1R01AI165505, 1R01AI170632, the Lloyd J. Old STAR Program CRI3888, and holds an Investigators in the Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease Award from the Burroughs Welcome Fund.
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R.J.A. is main inventor of SCENITH (Patent PCT/EP2020/060486) and is in the process of licensing the technology for commercialization of kits and providing patient-sample analysis services. In the past three years, C.A.L. has consulted for Astellas Pharmaceuticals, Odyssey Therapeutics, Third Rock Ventures, and T-Knife Therapeutics, and is an inventor on patents pertaining to KRAS-regulated metabolic pathways, redox control pathways in pancreatic cancer, and targeting the GOT1–ME1 pathway as a therapeutic approach (US Patent No: 2015126580-A1, 05/07/2015; US Patent No: 20190136238, 05/09/2019; International Patent No: WO2013177426-A2, 04/23/2015). T.A. holds several patents focused on imaging mass spectrometry and leads a startup on single-cell metabolomics incubated at the BioInnovation Institute. C.A.O. holds several patents on AHR activation and tryptophan catabolism and is founder and managing directors of cAHRmeleon Bioscience GmbH. The other authors declare no competing interests.
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Nature Metabolism thanks Luke O’Neill and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.
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Cosgrove, J., Marçais, A., Hartmann, F.J. et al. A call for accessible tools to unlock single-cell immunometabolism research. Nat Metab (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42255-024-01031-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s42255-024-01031-w
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