Blog

Muzlifah Haniffa, is a Wellcome Senior Clinical Research Fellow in Newcastle University and Associate Faculty at Wellcome Sanger Institute. A dermatologist by clinical training, her research is focused on the developing human immune system including in the skin. The subject area is at the interface of immunology, developmental biology and single cell genomics.

Muzlifah is a co-coordinator of the Developmental Biological Network within the Human Cell Atlas (HCA) initiative. In this blog, she tells us more about this global initiative, requiring multidisciplinary expertise, and how its ambitious effort to map every cell in the human body can improve our understanding of human health, as well as diagnosing, monitoring, and treating disease.

The Human Cell Atlas (HCA) is a global initiative that began in Oct 2016. It was co-founded by Aviv Regev at the Broad Institute and Sarah Teichmann at Wellcome Sanger Institute. The aim of the HCA is to create a reference atlas of the human body by mapping every cell. Within the last three years we have profiled 4.4 million cells. There are 37 trillion cells making up the human body, so we still have lots to do! 

Creating a reference atlas

Having a reference atlas of the healthy human body will allow us to understand what has changed in disease and how we can reverse or ameliorate these pathological processes. For example, our HCA research demonstrated that a common childhood tumour affecting the kidney, Wilms’ tumour, was due to aberrant nephron development. This has therapeutic implications as it means we can potentially treat Wilms’ tumour by inducing nephron differentiation instead of chemotherapy and surgery.

An atlas across the human lifespan will further our understanding of ageing with important applications for stem cell therapy and regenerative medicine. Our HCA studies showed how haematopoietic stem cells found prenatally are ‘supercharged’ with greater capacity to renew and differentiate into blood cells. Identifying the factors that can make stem cells more potent will improve stem cell therapies for example haematopoietic stem cell transplants, an effective therapy to treat leukaemia and lymphomas.

Working together towards a common goal

No single researcher or laboratory will have the expertise or capacity to undertake and deliver HCA independently. It needs multi-disciplinary expertise; scientists, clinicians, bioinformaticians, engineers, software developers and computer scientists. It is an endeavour that requires all these groups of people to work together towards a common goal. In addition, the atlas needs to capture the geographical diversity of what makes us human making it even more important for HCA to be a global effort. HCA is open to everyone to participate.

The HCA is an immensely valuable resource in both a tangible format i.e. identification of the cell types and molecular programs that make up the human body but also in an intangible format of data/information that can be mined to reveal new patterns and understanding that may not be immediately apparent. This is similar to data on our shopping, exercise, and lifestyle activities that can provide information about us and our society that we may not be aware of. 

HCA data is provided free as raw data and metadata submitted to repositories (e.g. HCA Data Coordination Portal, ArrayExpress and Gene Expression Omnibus) for researchers to analyse and also browsable data through webportals, e.g. https://developmentcellatlas.ncl.ac.uk and https://www.covid19cellatlas.org.

Trust, respect and openness  

The HCA initiative and resource have impacted research and the community in several ways. Firstly, it has changed how research is done – working collaboratively across many disciplines and research groups requires a research culture built on trust, respect and openness. The teams have to share ideas, protocols, data and findings seamless and rapidly. Secondly, it has fostered a global research community that works effectively in partnership across countries and continents towards a common goal of generating a human cell atlas. This community is training and nurturing the next generation of researchers within a collaborative and supportive research environment. Finally, the ambitious aim to map the cells in our body in space and time at scale has accelerated technological innovations e.g. spatial genomics and the development of new computational methods that will be used in a broader research domain.        

Open and equitable data sharing

Open data will accelerate the progress of research and enable more insights to be harnessed from the data by many researchers. This will ultimately benefit the key stakeholders of science, primarily the general public, through innovations that will enhance our health, prevent disease and develop new therapeutic strategies. However, data sharing needs to be compliant with governmental or regional regulations e.g. General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe and specific research project governance. 

There could be more incentives to encourage researchers in all fields to share data. Firstly, by recognising data provision and contribution as much as publications from the data in appraising a researcher’s productivity and output by academic institutions and funders. Secondly, by implementing the Fort Lauderdale Agreement on all types of data sharing to maximise benefit from early and unrestricted data sharing. The Agreement promotes free sharing of data prior to publication and was instrumental in expanding genomic data resource.  It also paved the way towards open access publishing in biomedicine.

There is definitely a massive benefit to open and equitable data sharing for everyone involved as we have experienced within the HCA initiative.