A book sits atop a table. Although it’s closed, its title, “Encyclopedia of Human Tissue,” promises untold secrets. Perhaps with this book, you can learn about different cell types and what they look like under normal conditions or conditions of disease. Maybe you can learn about how gene expression is different in the cells of younger and older people, or whether different patients’ cells respond differently to the same treatments.
But you can’t read the book. It’s been locked shut, immobilized by a plexiglass case. Disappointed, you set the inaccessible book back down and put it, and the hundreds of other books sitting next to it, out of your mind…
…until new technology opens those books wide.
This is what’s happening in the realm of cell biology. A new method pioneered by the lab of Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology Ken Lau is poised to make previously inaccessible medical knowledge that has been locked away in old patient samples newly accessible to scientists.
For over a century all around the world, human tissue has been preserved in formalin (also known as formaldehyde) and embedded in paraffin wax, allowing scientists and clinicians to examine tissues by thinly slicing, staining, and observing them under a microscope. However, some newer sequencing technologies have so far been difficult to use with these formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded samples. Lau’s new method changes that.
Single-cell RNA sequencing is one such technology. scRNA-seq has transformed scientists’ understanding of tissue heterogeneity, demonstrating that cells within a single tissue express different kinds and levels of RNA—the intermediary between DNA’s genetic instructions and its protein products.
Archives of FFPE samples seem perfect for harvesting biological information using newer techniques, but, according to Lau lab graduate student James Evans , the molecular information can be damaged during preservation, making it challenging to recover and analyze.
Previous research has succeeded in isolating cell nuclei from FFPE samples, but a lot of information is lost—particularly RNA—when the rest of the cell is discarded. Lau, in a paper led by Evans and co-first author Joey Simmons —a senior research specialist in the Lau lab—have built on a method that Simmons created to isolate and recover more high-quality, intact cells for further study. Their paper was published in Cellular and Molecular Gastroenterology and Hepatology in August 2026.
“By recovering whole cells instead of only their nuclei, our method captures more of the biological information contained within each cell. This could make the enormous collections of patient samples already stored in hospitals a source of rich molecular data,” Evans said.
The new method also excelled at recovering cell types that are often not recovered in high numbers, which generates a more complete picture of the cells present in the tissue.
Evans and the team tested their method in two tissue types: colon and thymus. Although the whole-cell recovery was much better in the colon tissue, the method had limited benefits in thymus tissue.
“Our results suggest that recovering whole cells may be especially useful in tissues containing larger cells that have more material outside the nucleus, such as the cells that line the colon, compared to the smaller immune cells in the thymus,” he said.
Evans hopes that this research will spur other scientists to tap the decades-deep pool of patient samples. He is particularly excited about the potential to study tissue from patients whose medical histories and outcomes are already known.
“Researchers could examine an archived tumor and investigate how the individual cells within that tumor differed between patients who responded differently to treatment or experienced different outcomes,” he said. “Studies like these could eventually help researchers better understand how diseases develop and progress, identify biological features associated with patient outcomes, and discover new markers or potential targets for treatment.”
Using the new tool, scientists can now reach toward that table of locked encyclopedias and access knowledge and insights that were previously inaccessible to them.
Go deeper
The paper “ Intact Cell Dissociation of FFPE Colon Tissue Enhances Cell Recovery and Gene Detection in scRNA-seq ” was published in Cellular and Molecular Gastroenterology and Hepatology in August 2026. The sequencing datasets generated in this study have been deposited in the Gene Expression Omnibus under accession number GSE338505.
Evans and Simmons would like to acknowledge the invaluable help of the Epithelial Biology Center, the Center for Computational Systems Biology, and their collaborators at Duke University.
Funding
This research used funds from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.
Open access
The study was published open access through a transformative agreement negotiated by Vanderbilt University’s Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries . Transformative agreements eliminate traditional paywalls and remove the obstacle of article processing charges, ensuring immediate and unrestricted access to research worldwide. Vanderbilt authors can learn more about the Heard Libraries’ agreements supporting open access publishing in this research guide .
Cellular and Molecular Gastroenterology and Hepatology
Experimental study
Intact Cell Dissociation of FFPE Colon Tissue Enhances Cell Recovery and Gene Detection in scRNA-seq
13-Aug-2026