A decade since its founding, the International Human Cell Atlas Consortium is hosting a high-profile meeting in Boston this week, with panels featuring more than two dozen prominent academics and biotech industry leaders, including Genentech’s Aviv Regev, David Altshuler of Vertex Pharmaceuticals, and Eric Lander from the Broad Institute. The event, which is expected to draw hundreds of scientists from across the globe, comes at an inflection point in the HCA’s ambitious aim to build a comprehensive reference map of all the different types of cells that make up a human body.
Later this year, the HCA expects to deliver a first draft — the completion of single-cell atlases across all of the major organs and tissues — that promise to boost researchers’ understanding of how the body works. So far the HCA has focused on building a reference of healthy cells and the genes they express. In its next phase, it plans to tackle disease, and that means amassing knowledge about where particular cells are located, who their neighbors are, and who they’re communicating with — a rapidly emerging field known as spatial biology.
It’s embarking on this expansion when the field is awash in new technology options from companies like Vizgen, Bruker, Illumina, Takara Bio, Bio-Techne, and 10x Genomics, a Bay Area company whose single-cell RNA sequencing technology was the workhorse of the HCA’s first phase. Scientists who want to join this effort will be faced with decisions about which commercially available solutions to use.
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