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A global quest to map billions of cells has made significant discoveries about their role in conditions ranging from chronic gut diseases to arthritis, boosting scientific understanding of human health.
Results from the first phase of the Human Cell Atlas project probed problems from Covid-19’s impact on lungs to how genetic variation affects susceptibility to disease.
The Atlas promises to be “a kind of ‘Google Maps’ for cell biology” and is already “transforming our understanding of human health”, said Sarah Teichmann, founding co-chair of the project.
The effort to understand the internal complexities of cells and their function is a critical goal for researchers, as it promises to unlock crucial information about how our bodies grow, age and decay. The Atlas project harnessed the power of artificial intelligence to analyse and detect patterns in vast biological data sets.
“It establishes a benchmark for detecting and understanding the changes that underlie health and disease,” said Teichmann, a genomics expert at the UK’s Cambridge Stem Cell Institute. “This new level of insight into the specific genes, mechanisms and cell types within tissues is laying the groundwork for more precise diagnostics, innovative drug discovery and advanced regenerative medicine approaches.”
Thousands of researchers in more than 100 countries have so far helped the Atlas profile 100mn cells from more than 10,000 people since its launch in 2017. Project participants published more than 40 papers on their early results on Wednesday in Nature and related journals.
Work on the gut, contrasting healthy and diseased tissue, identified a cell type that may be linked to inflammation, the researchers said. That has provided clues for probing painful conditions such as ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease.
Other research included a map of how the human skeleton forms, offering potential insights into the causes of arthritis, a condition that leads to inflammation or degeneration in the joints. Another study looked at how genes control the way developing embryos receive nutrients in the womb via the placenta.
The “landmark” collection of papers showed the “tremendous progress towards mapping every single kind of human cell and how they change as we grow up and age”, said Jeremy Farrar, the World Health Organization’s chief scientist.
Eric Topol, founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in California, said the project had made a “big step forward towards understanding the biology of our remarkably diverse roughly 37tn cells”, adding: “There’s plenty more work to do but this can certainly be considered a milestone in a Herculean science effort.”
The project comes as other scientists focus on understanding the structures of various constituents of cells and how they relate to each other.
Earlier this year Google DeepMind unveiled the latest iteration of its AI-driven AlphaFold model, further extending its ability to predict the interactions involving proteins that are the building blocks of life.
The Atlas project has emphasised the need for its information to be as diverse as possible, to address concerns that large human health data sets are skewed towards people from rich countries. Its efforts to achieve this include building an Asian Immune Diversity Atlas and analysing the impact of Covid-19 from samples taken from Malawi in southern Africa.
