ABOUT THE HUMAN CELL ATLAS

The Human Cell Atlas is an international collaborative research consortium that is mapping all cell types in the healthy body, across time from development to adulthood, and eventually to old age. Creating this comprehensive reference map of human cells is transforming our understanding of health and disease, to drive major advances in healthcare and medicine worldwide.

Cells are the building blocks of the human body, but we still do not know all the types of cells that create human anatomy. We need maps of all the different cells, their molecular characteristics and where they are located, to understand how the human body works and what goes wrong in disease.

Using cutting-edge single cell and spatial genomics at massive scale, combined with powerful computing and AI methods, HCA researchers are uncovering the intricate details of how the genes in our cells shape life.

Creating the Human Cell Atlas is an enormous undertaking, larger even than the Human Genome Project, and is revolutionising our understanding of the 37.2 trillion cells in the human body. If the Human Genome Project gave us the “book of life”, the Human Cell Atlas captures how each cell in the body reads this book. It is only possible now thanks to global collaboration, technological and computational breakthroughs, and science at great scale.

The HCA is committed to creating an open, ethical, equitable and representative atlas for humanity, which will benefit communities worldwide. This requires a global effort and many funders worldwide. HCA membership is open to the entire scientific community across the world – join us here.

HCA Snapshots in Time

Techniques

With the past decade’s “resolution revolution” in genomics, we can now build molecular maps of individual cells at an astonishing scale, and connect them to their function in tissues. Using the very latest single cell and spatial genomics combined with powerful computing and AI methods, HCA researchers are revealing which of the 20,000 genes in an individual cell are switched on. This creates a unique “ID card” for each cell type and allows scientists to discover new cell types and functions. With additional rapidly-evolving spatial analysis methods, HCA scientists map these individual cells into precise locations in organs and tissues, and understand their functions and relationships with their neighbours.

Assembling the Human Cell Atlas

The first draft Human Cell Atlas is now being assembled, focusing on 18 HCA Biological Networks of individual tissues or systems. HCA data is available at the HCA Data Portal, with initial Lung and Brain Atlases already released and more to come. These HCA Biological Network Atlases will collectively form the first draft Human Cell Atlas, a huge scientific milestone.

Looking forward, the HCA is aiming to create a globally representative, comprehensive Human Cell Atlas of 10 billion cells across all organs and tissues, to transform health research worldwide.

Media about HCA

Impacts of HCA

The global HCA community has profiled tens of millions of cells from nearly 10,000 individuals and produced more than 190 HCA scientific publications so far, yielding fundamental insights into human biology and its malfunctions in disease.

The HCA is producing a healthy reference map, like a ‘Google Maps’ for the human body, which can be compared with disease to understand illnesses, or serve as a blueprint for developing molecular and cell therapies. By driving new technologies for disease diagnosis, and enabling development of new treatments and advances in regenerative medicine, the HCA is likely to facilitate great transformations in healthcare.

While our main focus is on the healthy body, the Human Cell Atlas is already providing insights into cancer, COVID-19, cystic fibrosis, bowel, heart and lung diseases and many other illnesses.

For example, HCA research is driving advances in disease modelling using mini organs (organoids), and on medical diagnostics for inflammatory bowel disease and cancer. New computational tools have highlighted potential new drug and cell targets, and understanding the developing immune system has provided critical information for engineering therapeutic T cells. HCA researchers are also tackling diseases with high unmet need in low- and middle-income settings, such as tuberculosis, and are ensuring human diversity is covered to enable progress towards equitable health care.

Global Community

The international Human Cell Atlas Consortium was co-founded in 2016 by Dr Aviv Regev and Dr Sarah Teichmann. Since then, the open global initiative has grown to encompass more than 3,000 members from 99 countries, bringing together a community of biologists, clinicians, technologists, physicists, computational scientists, software engineers, and mathematicians, working together internationally to create the Human Cell Atlas.

The HCA is committed to creating an open, ethical, equitable and representative atlas for humanity, which will benefit communities worldwide by helping to advance research and healthcare globally. Researchers around the world contribute to the HCA, work within their local communities to explain the benefits and purpose of the HCA, and collect and study samples representing humans’ incredible diversity. We’re proud that the HCA scientific community includes members from every inhabited continent.

A grass-roots led, global and open scientific project, the HCA is not itself a funding organisation, but instead is supported by many funders from all around the world. Such a large, global initiative needs diverse, collaborative funding, and the HCA community is grateful to all past, present and future funders for their generosity and support.

For more information

See the HCA White Paper from 2017 and our manifesto for an in-depth overview of the project. These reveal the framework for the first draft of the atlas; descriptions of the technology, data analysis tools, and data coordination required, as well as a deeper look at biological systems we are exploring and mapping; and details on the organization and governance of the HCA.

For further information you can also see our FAQ.