In the fifth in a series of interviews with HCA members around the world, we hear from Piero Carninci who is the host for the 2024 HCA General Meeting in Milan, Italy.

Piero Carninci is Head of the Genomics Research Centre, Functional Genomics Programme at Human Technopole, Milan, Italy, as well as Team Leader at the RIKEN Centre for Integrative Medical Sciences in Yokohama, Japan. He is also a member of the HCA Organizing Committee and the HCA Executive Committee, and a leader of the HCA Asia Network.

Following his doctoral degree at the University of Trieste in 1989, Piero developed DNA technologies at a start-up company, Talent Srl. He moved to Japan in 1995 for a postdoc at RIKEN Tsukuba Life Science Center, and remained based in Japan working with RIKEN, becoming Deputy Director of the RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences in 2018. Now he splits his time between Italy and Japan, developing the next generation of technologies to study life sciences.

Please introduce yourself briefly and tell us about your career. How did you get involved with HCA?
I moved to Japan 29 years ago, working on technologies to advance understanding of the genome and how genes are controlled. I then became involved in the international FANTOM consortium which is still running. My initial goal was to profile and detect protein coding genes in the genome, but this led to something surprising, the discovery of non-coding RNAs. These pieces of RNA don’t code for proteins, but are crucial for gene expression. We also extensively worked with CAGE technology to map promoters and enhancers in a large compendium of human primary cells.

In 2016 Aviv Regev and Sarah Teichmann invited me to a small meeting in Tarrytown. They were thinking of how to start the Human Cell Atlas Consortium, and were interested in my experience of setting up international collaborations with FANTOM, and technical expertise. Since then I’ve worked to catalyse the HCA Asia Network, including setting up an HCA Executive Office in Asia. Working with Sarah and Aviv as part of the HCA has been so positive, it’s really fantastic.

What are you working on right now? How will this help people?
We want to understand the gene expression mechanisms that regulate biological activity. This involves developing tools to connect regulatory elements to the RNA transcript and mapping all these regulatory elements in the 3D space of cells.

I’m also working on expanding the HCA Asia Network, which is profiling promoters and gene expression in people from Asian countries. To create targeted precision medicine we need to understand gene expression and learn how genetic background influences the human body in health and disease. Asia has more than half the world’s population and it is vital to increase participation in Asia, including Central and South Asia. There are parallel HCA efforts in Africa, South America and the Middle East.

The 2024 HCA General Meeting will be held in Milan, what are you looking forward to in this meeting?
I’m now mainly based in Italy, at the Human Technopole, and am delighted to host the next HCA General Meeting in Milan. The HCA is doing really well and we are ready to discuss the next phase – how to create a fully comprehensive Human Cell Atlas.

I’m looking forward to the GM being a well organised science party! Where everyone joins in the discussion of science and helps develop science plans. Discussions on what the final form of HCA would be, and how the Atlas can be integrated into older frameworks, like histology and anatomy. How to understand gene expression in different tissues and in space, and also how to use the data to understand cell function. It’s a very exciting time.

We hope that people who attend the GM will have a great experience being part of the project, and that they continue to interact and work together after the meeting. We will also have a poster session with younger researchers to help empower the next generation. People can register at https://events.humancellatlas.org/2024GM

Openness and diversity is at the heart of HCA, how is this important to you?
Open data is important so more people can use it for scientific progress. Data shared in the Human Genome Project has induced lots of additional knowledge and finance, and projects like FANTOM and ENCODE are all open data and are massively used.

When I was a student in Trieste, I studied at ICGEB, a centre that trained scientists from Low and Middle Income countries. I learned how important it is! From the first small HCA Asia meeting in Okinawa in 2017, the HCA Asia Network has really grown and last year’s HCA Asia Meeting in India was a great success. It was amazing to see.

The scale of the growth of the HCA consortium is rarely seen in other projects. With thousands of people across more than 100 countries, this project is unique.

What do you hope HCA will achieve in the next 5-10 years? What healthcare innovations do you see HCA leading to?
The HCA Biological Networks are already creating integrated atlases of individual tissues and organs, which will make up the first draft Human Cell Atlas. Medical knowledge is often fragmented into the anatomy or physiology of specific organs, as if they were independent living entities, but in the next 5-10 years HCA will scale up to include the whole human body, and incorporate spatial data and other omics.

The text books will have to be rewritten as our understanding of cells changes! Histology slides are flat but the Atlas will be 3-D, and will have much more information. The shared increase in knowledge will permeate many fields, and lead to a revolution in healthcare. From better diagnostics for cancer and other diseases and identifying new therapies, to understanding pharmacogenetics and creating personalised medicine.

What advice would you give to anyone wanting to get involved with the HCA?
Just do it! Joining the HCA is a good way to become part of the community, and access more tools, more colleagues and help you understand your data.

Come to some of the HCA meetings. There is lots of information on the HCA website, which is a good starting point, but direct interaction with the scientists is vital. Join online, or even better, come in person and have lunch and a chat to help start a collaboration.

Photo Credit: Human Technopole, Milan