Breakout Session Leaders: Sami Farhi & Holger Heyn

This session will examine the challenges and opportunities associated with generating and integrating highly heterogeneous large-scale spatial datasets, particularly in the context of the 30 Billion Cells spatial program and related initiatives. Participants will discuss how additional modalities, including advanced imaging approaches, proteomics, and other emerging technologies, could be incorporated into the existing program and through complementary future efforts to create richer, multidimensional atlases. The session will also highlight immediate technical barriers that could benefit from focused community collaboration through future workshops, hackathons, and method-development efforts, including challenges such as cell segmentation, data standardization, and computational scalability. Finally, the discussion will explore strategies for integrating and harmonizing data across platforms and modalities to enable more unified, interoperable, and biologically meaningful spatial atlas resources.