Human Cell Atlas Consortium Shares Latest Collection of Foundational Studies

Study in a Sentence: The Human Cell Atlas (HCA) consortium shared a collection of articles providing an overview of the HCA to date, studies focusing on human development, computational tools, and organ-specific analyses, and an update to the HCA data portal containing 62 million cells collected from 9,100 donors.

Healthy for Humans: The HCA was founded in 2016 with the goal to build a biological 3D atlas of every cell in the human body. The HCA consortium has released draft atlases of the lung, nervous system, and eye and is constructing 18 others, including immune, heart, and skin, improving understanding of fundamental human biological processes, providing a paramount reference tool for monitoring health and diagnosing and treating disease, and propelling precision medicine and translational discoveries.

Redefining Research: The HCA consortium uses advanced experimental and computational methods to understand how cells vary across tissues, systems, organs, ancestries, and throughout development, as well as their role in health and disease. It employs genomic analyses, organoids, spatial mapping, and computational inference to study unprecedented numbers of diverse human cells and molecular states unlike ever before.