Sanger Human Cell Atlasing Project (HCA)

The Wellcome Sanger Institute

Status: Invitation-only

Conditions: Genetic Disease; Human Development

Treatments: Other: sample collection

Study type: Observational

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT06497673

260474

Details and patient eligibility

About

"Cell Atlasing" refers to a novel strategy to characterise cells in tissues at the molecular level in a quantitative manner. The international Human Cell Atlas consortium brings together a community of biologists, clinicians, technologists, physicists, computational scientists, software engineers, and mathematicians to capitalise on drawing together leaders with various biological, technical and computational expertise. The project is based on the aim to define all human cell types in terms of their distinctive patterns of gene expression, physiological states, developmental trajectories, and location. This will pave the way to create a reference map of all human cells as a basis for understanding human health and diagnosing, monitoring, and treating disease.

Full description

Previous methods for quantifying molecular states of cells included microarray and standard RNA-seq analysis on a tissue section (RNA-seq is a technique to look at the activity of all the genes in a cell). These methods estimate the activity of any given gene by averaging the signal from millions of cells. Given the heterogeneity of cell populations (i.e.how uniform they are), measurement of the mean values of signals overlooks the internal interactions and differences within a cell population that may be crucial for maintaining normal tissue function and facilitating disease progression.

The Sanger Human Cell Atlasing project will adopt various genomic approaches that will provide genome-wide information in a single experiment. This project aims to scale up the single cell genomics and high-throughput highly multiplex spatial gene expression profiling approaches. Coupled with powerful computational methods, this strategy will produce a comprehensive and systematic reference map of human cells, providing a fundamental blueprint of cell states for both basic biological research and clinical practice.

Enrollment: 4,000 estimated patients

Sex: All

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• Samples are from the living and the deceased age 0 to 99+ from healthy and diseased individuals.
• All samples will have fully informed consent for use in research.

Exclusion criteria

• Samples taken without consent for use in future research
• Samples taken from individuals without the capacity to consent to use in research