Exclusive Interview with Dr. Arutha Kulasinghe: Insights into Tissue Profiling and the Spatial Biology Field

On September 28, 2022, the Editorial Office of Extracellular Vesicles and Circulating Nucleic Acids (EVCNA) had an exclusive interview with Dr. Arutha Kulasinghe, the NHMRC Research Fellow and Group Leader of Clinical-oMx Lab at the University of Queensland of Australia and Junior Editorial Board member of EVCNA, to discuss his current achievements and his research journey, as well as his view into tissue profiling and the spatial biology field. He was recently awarded an ASSC (the Australian Skin and Skin Cancer Research Centre) grant, which will focus on the metabolic profiling of skin cancers using cutting-edge tissue mapping approaches.

The moderator of this interview, Dr. Tomer Cooks, is an Assistant Professor of the Department of Immunology of the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev of Israel, and a Junior Editorial Board member of EVCNA. His research interests focus on the tumor microenvironment, extracellular vesicles, mutant p53, radiotherapy, alpha-particles, and tumor immunology.

These two excellent researchers conducted in-depth discussions on tissue profiling and spatial biology. They provided many insights on skin cancer therapy, as well as the possibility of applying tissue analysis to identify the distribution of Extracellular Vesicles (EVs) in the future. Here's what went down:

Question 1: What has been your research journey to date?

Question 2: How did you get into tissue profiling and the spatial biology field?

Question 3: What insights are you gleaning with spatial profiling – such as the recent skin cancer grant?

Question 4: What are the current developments of these tools – are they only discoveries, or is there clinical translation?

Question 5: Do you see any possibilities in the future to put tissue profiling into identifying distributions of EVs?

Question 6: Do you think that this will become such a major tool that would be in every department in the future?

Question 7: When you have a huge amount of data, how do you filter what you really want to present?

Question 8: What kind of research do you want to achieve in the next 5 years?

Question 9: How to convince physicians or clinicians to wait for new solutions?

Question 10: For scientists who do not have a background in tissue profiling, how do they start to enter this field?