BarcelonaFrom birth to aging, when you are healthy and when you suffer from an illness. Thousands of scientists around the world are working side by side to solve the great unknowns of human biology: how the more than 37 billion cells that make us up behave, why they do it the way they do, and how they can keep in an optimal state. To understand how these essential elements for life change over the years, interact with each other and differ from the rest, the international Human Cell Atlas consortium was born in 2016 , which currently consists of nearly 4,000 researchers from around the world.
Eight years later, the platform has published a first installment with about forty high-resolution, high-quality studies using genomics and artificial intelligence (AI). One of them is dedicated to getting to know the gastrointestinal tract in depth to understand the differences between healthy people and those with diseases such as celiac disease, Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. From more than a million tissue cells from the mouth, esophagus, stomach, intestines and colon, a team led by Wellcome Sanger Institute immunologist Amanda Oliver has been able to discover a type of intestinal cell that may be involved in inflammation and the immune response, and that could be a valuable resource to investigate and treat these pathologies.
Another study published this Wednesday focuses on the skeleton and the differences between the cells that make up bones and cartilage, which are hidden behind diseases such as arthritis. But there is also another that, based on 70,000 cells from women in the first trimester of pregnancy, provides a detailed picture of the formation of the placenta and how it provides nutrients and protection to the embryo. This information will be key for the pregnancy to reach term without causing risks to the mother (hypertension or diabetes) or to the child (growth restrictions, premature births or abortions), for example.
However, the jewel in the crown will be – because everything is still very incipient – the atlas of the brain, the most unknown and diverse organ, since it is believed that there are subneurons yet to be discovered. In this installment, the changes it undergoes during its maturation are put on the table, with the aim of studying how Alzheimer’s or schizophrenia originates.
An ambitious project
The ambitious goal of this atlas, according to the consortium, is to make personalized medicine more accessible and improve treatments. “This initiative is already transforming our understanding of human health. By creating a comprehensive reference map of the healthy human body – a sort of Google Maps of cell biology – a benchmark is established for detecting and understanding the changes behind health and disease,” he says. Sarah Teichmann, founding co-chair of this project. As he details, this atlas will have a “transformative impact on biology and medicine”: “We anticipate that its information will revolutionize health care worldwide in the long term.”
For years the consortium has published different thematic cell atlases (lung, brain and retina) and eighteen atlases of tissues, organs or systems are already being made which, in the future, will complete the Human Cell Atlas. “Next year approximately”, according to Teichmann. “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. This is only possible now thanks to global collaboration, technological and computational advances, and large-scale science,” the consortium says on its website.
