As you read this, trillions of your cells are performing biology’s perfect symphony, keeping you alive and in tune.
Yet they labor in anonymity, their names and performances largely unknown.
An ambitious new consortium of international scientists, meeting at Stanford’s School of Medicine on Thursday and Friday, aims to change that. Their goal: The Human Cell Atlas, backed by Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg and his physician wife Priscilla Chan.
Think of it as a vast LinkedIn for cell types, describing who they are, where they work and what they do — critical information for understanding both health and disease.
“We believe it is feasible,” said conference organizer Steve Quake, co-president of Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, the new $600 million center funded by Zuckerberg and Chan that is helping to lead the project.
How will it be accomplished? The tools and technologies will be discussed at Stanford, in a follow-up to the initial meeting held in London last October. Building a human cell atlas would require a collaboration across many disciplines in the international scientific community, using a standardized approach to compare diverse cell types from different human communities.
“It’s incredibly exciting and very unusual,” said Quake, “a grass-roots effort of 300 leading scientists, all the leading lights in the field, coming to Stanford … to talk about the best technical approaches, which of the different technologies to deploy.”
When complete, The Human Cell Atlas will be made available to researchers around the world.
The cell is the core unit of the human body, controlling the body’s major organs, such as the brain, heart and lungs.
As your body develops, cells that are generalists, called stem cells, mature and specialize — choosing whether to become a heart cell, neuron or the keratin of your toenail, for instance. And many must differentiate still further. For example, a blood stem cell turns into a red blood cell, white blood cell, platelet or other components of the blood.
We understand little about how, why and where these decisions are made. While a few cell types are relatively well understood, many more are poorly known or even undiscovered, Quake said.
“Textbooks say there are 200 to 300 cell types,” said Quake, “but that’s because the methodology to characterize them has been limited. We only knew the shape of the cell and what proteins are on the outside — just a limited number of variables.”
He thinks there are many more — perhaps up to 3,000 cell types.
Using tissue donated to labs, Quake dreams of depicting the internal genetic machinery of cells in unprecedented detail, allowing scientists to search for the basic breakdowns that occur within cells when disease strikes.
Each cell has about 20,000 genes, which are instructions for making molecules that organisms need to survive. But this production process varies, turning on and off in an intricate dance, creating both health and disease.
Quake conceived of The Human Cell Atlas about a decade ago — and has the intellect, creativity and ambition to make it happen.
Meanwhile, scientists from a dozen other places around the world simultaneously came up with the idea, and independently started developing their own mapping strategies.
Former Stanford President John Hennessy was instrumental in helping establish the initiative, working closely with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative on its inception. He will serve on the board in his personal capacity as a scientist and technologist.
“This initiative will dramatically improve our ability to conduct fundamental research at the intersection of biology and engineering that can lead to important applications for human health,” Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne, who is also a neuroscientist, said in a statement. “We are grateful for the investment by Mark and Priscilla in both sophisticated tools and an unprecedented Bay Area-wide university collaboration that will enable groundbreaking discovery.”
A professor of bioengineering and applied physics, Quake brings a special expertise to the field: He has devised the sophisticated microfluidic devices that can analyze large numbers of cells, quickly and accurately.
This new field, called single cell genomics, can decipher gene sequences from individual cells. This makes possible a massive-scale data production process like The Human Cell Atlas.
“Because of the tools my group and others have discovered over the past decade, we can get a much more detailed molecular profile of each cell we analyze,” he said.
“We can measure or ask questions about each cell,” he said. “It provides a wealth of great information and more detail.”
To learn more about The Human Cell Atlas project, go to https://www.humancellatlas.org.
