Two separate spatial‑biology initiatives advanced this week: the Asia‑Pacific Spatial Translational Research Alliance (ASTRA), led by Garvan Institute and University of Tokyo, will use 10x Genomics’ Xenium platform to build a pan‑cancer atlas of 2,000 tumors; a Nature Communications study used spatial multi‑omics to link pro‑inflammatory chemokine activity to aggressive prostate cancer phenotypes. ASTRA aims to standardize large‑scale spatial datasets across sites for translational research and biomarker discovery, while the prostate study demonstrates how combined spatial transcriptomics and proteomics can map immune and stromal niches tied to tumor aggressiveness. Both efforts underscore a push to bring spatial context into clinical biomarker pipelines and to inform patient selection for targeted and immune therapies. Clarification: spatial multi‑omics combines gene expression and protein detection with spatial coordinates, revealing how cellular neighborhoods and microenvironments shape disease biology and therapy response.