In the first funding period and as the ubiquitous starting point for all downstream approaches, we started with the procurement of pancreatic tissues. Here, we focused on full-organs from brain-dead organ donors as well as pancreatic slices from pancreatectomies (unaffected regions of the organ). The pandemic did only slightly delay the procurement from organ donors, but finally provide more procurements due to less transplantations (The Netherlands), while the dramatic COVID-19 situation in Italy diminished the sample procurement of pancreatic tissues from pancreatectomies. Instead of procured T2D samples, we received bio-banked islet samples from North American resources. Here, we still aim for the comparison of the molecular profiles form T2D and unaffected individuals. In addition, we also overachieved procured foetal pancreatic tissues (foetuses from abortion without medical indication) to explore cell maturation.
In particular, the ESPACE Human Cell Atlas project provides multiomic characterization of pancreas organ including proteomics and genomics. We conducted separate sequencing of single-cells or -nuclei and spatial proteomics technologies, including 16 different individuals and 4 different locations in the respective donated pancreatic organs. Due to quality issues, we explicitly decided to run single nuclei RNA and epigenetics sequencing separately to achieve most precise outputs from the different experimental branches.
Due to the pandemic and corresponding delays, the consortium was also affected in exchange and communication within. This will further delay the first comprehensive cell atlas of the pancreas, although all the projected data is stored, we worked on cloud-based analysis and dissemination output (joined publications).
On the other hand, single-nuclei sequencing pancreas protocols really helped to study post-mortem respiratory, brain and lung COVID-19 samples. This should be considered as a wider societal and scientifical impact in the pandemic.
