A cross‑institution Spatial Touchstone project published in Nature Biotechnology released best practices, SOPs and an open‑source benchmarking portal for imaging‑based spatial transcriptomics. Teams from St. Jude, Weill Cornell and the University of Adelaide produced a high‑quality FFPE reference dataset covering more than eight million cells analyzed on 10x Genomics Xenium and Bruker CosMx SMI platforms. The initiative supplies SOPs, quality metrics, and a web portal to let researchers rapidly assess run quality and compare datasets across platforms—efforts intended to reduce variability, improve reproducibility, and accelerate adoption of spatial methods in translational research and drug discovery.