The development of droplet based long-read single-cell sequencing technology to understand the mechanism of multiple myeloma drug resistance

Multiple myeloma (MM) is a cancer of plasma cells, with a varied response rate to treatment and a survival age of 4-5 years.

A key feature contributing to the poor survival of patients is the emergence of drug resistance. Understanding the mechanisms that contribute to this will allow us to identify better treatments.

Adam will present an overview of why single-cell technologies are critical for understanding the clonal development multiple myeloma, including the state of play of current short-read single-cell technologies. However, our group has shown that short-read sequencing technologies, such as 10X, only provide limited information with which to understand multiple myeloma cancer drug resistance mechanisms.

In order to provide a better characterisation of the genomic mechanisms driving myeloma development, Adam’s group have developed direct cDNA droplet based long-read (Nanopore) single-cell sequencing technology. This technology allows the examination of RNA splicing, identification of single nucleotide polymorphisms, IgG gene rearrangement analysis and measurement of chimeric transcripts at the single-cell level.