Crownlands, Inc., a company scaling the collection of living human neurons to generate molecular data for AI-driven drug discovery and clinical trial modeling, today announced the public release of a ...
Autore: Business Wire
Four million single cells from 200-plus donors capture human neuronal biology in tissue context, now accessible via the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s CZ CELLxGENE platform
SAN FRANCISCO: Crownlands, Inc., a company scaling the collection of living human neurons to generate molecular data for AI-driven drug discovery and clinical trial modeling, today announced the public release of a large-scale single-cell dataset derived from olfactory neurons, marking the company’s launch and introducing a new resource for the neuroscience community. The de-identified dataset, comprising four million cells from more than 200 donors, is now freely accessible to the scientific community via the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s CZ CELLxGENE platform. It represents the largest single-cell dataset on the platform from living human donors and is intended to support target discovery, biomarker development, and translational research in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and other neurodegenerative conditions.
Alzheimer’s disease remains one of the largest unmet needs in medicine, with persistently low clinical success rates. The field’s focus on a narrow set of targets reflects limited access to human disease biology. While longitudinal sampling of disease-specific tissue has driven mechanistic discovery in other areas, it has not been possible in neuroscience, where brain biopsy from living human donors is not viable at scale.
Crownlands’ Gateway platform combines a proprietary medical device, single-cell sequencing, and centralized processing to enable minimally invasive, scalable collection of neuronal data from living patients across multiple collection sites. By standardizing both sampling and downstream workflows, the platform overcomes longstanding limitations in using olfactory neurons and enables longitudinal studies of neuronal disease progression.
“The next few years hold incredible opportunity to apply AI in service of solving some of the most challenging diseases, but progress will follow the availability of high-quality, biologically relevant data,” said Nate Dalva, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Crownlands. “We believe scaled human data, including our novel Gateway data, will accelerate the development of effective new medicines for neurological conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease. We’re proud to make this data freely available to the research community to explore, validate, and build upon.”
Crownlands is also releasing a co-scientist research agent, freely available at chat.crownlands.com, that lets researchers query the full four-million-cell de-identified dataset in natural language, including questions about specific genes, pathways, and cell types.
Crownlands generated the four-million-cell dataset using 10x Genomics’ Flex Apex technology to perform scalable single-cell transcriptomic profiling of living human neuronal samples collected through its Gateway platform. By combining standardized processing of fixed samples with multi-site clinical collection and centralized analysis, Crownlands generated reproducible data across more than 200 donors enrolled in IRB-approved studies over a 10-month period, including healthy individuals and patients with Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and other neurodegenerative conditions. Leveraging Flex Apex, the workflow enabled consistent, high-quality data generation across geographically distributed collection sites, supporting scalable longitudinal and translational research applications in neurodegenerative disease.
In an accompanying preprint, Crownlands reports that olfactory neurons collected from living patients capture key features of brain biology, including broad coverage of brain-enriched genes and core neuronal functions such as synaptic signaling and axonal biology. Notably, these neurons reflect a large proportion of the gene expression observed in living brain tissue, supporting their relevance for studying human disease.
The analysis also identifies Alzheimer’s disease-associated signals in patient samples and shows that key neurodegenerative disease genes are expressed in biologically relevant cell types. Importantly, data generated across multiple clinical sites demonstrated consistent quality and reproducibility, supporting the scalability of the approach.
“Olfactory neurons have long been understood as the only clinically accessible whole neurons, but scalable, standardized data has been out of reach until now,” said Kevin Zhu, PhD, co-founder and Head of Discovery at Crownlands and lead author of the manuscript. “Our results show that olfactory neurons capture key transcriptional features of brain biology and detect disease-associated signals across patients. In addition to amyloid-beta and tau biology, we show that Alzheimer’s Gateway neurons offer visibility into other important AD pathways, including neuroinflammation, mitochondrial stress, endosomal and lysosomal trafficking disruption, and lipid biology.”
The Gateway-generated dataset is available for exploration on the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s CZ CELLxGENE platform at: cellxgene.cziscience.com.
Crownlands’ co-scientist research agent is available at: chat.crownlands.com.
The preprint, titled “Gateway: patient olfactory neurons for large-scale discovery in neurodegenerative disease,” is available at: https://www.biorxiv.org.
About Crownlands
Crownlands is a translational biology company working with patients and physicians to generate rich, longitudinal data that connect human biology, disease progression, and clinical outcomes. The company's initial datasets and clinical studies focus on molecular and clinical data in neuroscience. Gateway, a novel platform developed by Crownlands, scales the collection of neurons from living patients, creating a new window into longitudinal brain biology. The company is applying this human-first approach to accelerate AI-powered discovery, improve therapeutic target selection, inform clinical trial design, and advance healthcare delivery. More information can be found at www.crownlands.com and on LinkedIn.
Fonte: Business Wire