Discoveries on the horizon with creation of largest human lung cell map

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The largest and most extensive cell map of the human lung was published June 8 in Nature Medicine. Encompassing more than 2.4 million cells across 486 individuals, the Human Lung Cell Atlas (HLCA) will be a tremendous asset and resource to lung researchers and medical scientists. The HLCA will enable new insights into lung biology, including the diversity of cell types found in the lung and significant variances between healthy and diseased lung cells.

To create the integrated atlas, researchers used advanced machine learning to pool 49 datasets from approximately 40 separate lung studies. The combined large-scale, cross-dataset incorporated results from every major single-cell RNA-sequencing published lung study.

“The Human Lung Cell Atlas is a huge resource for the scientific and medical community,” said Alexander Misharin, MD, PhD, a senior author on the paper and associate professor of medicine in pulmonary and critical care at Northwestern. “New disease data can be mapped onto the HLCA, transforming research in lung biology and disease. As the first whole reference atlas of a major organ, the HLCA also represents a milestone toward achieving a full Human Cell Atlas, which will transform our understanding of biology and disease and lay the foundation for a new era of health care.”

The HLCA has already identified shared cell states across multiple lung diseases, including lung cancer, pulmonary fibrosis and COVID-19. This will help researchers discover and test new therapeutic targets. The atlas will also be able to highlight cellular differences and reveal rare cell types. 

The Misharin laboratory, along with the Simpson Querrey Lung Institute for Translational Science, contributed biological expertise that was essential in constructing the HLCA to be understandable, actionable and applicable to lung conditions. Going forward, the scientific community can use the HLCA as a reference to chart new data, which will generate accelerated data annotation and analysis. 

Nearly 100 international partners from more than 60 departments collaborated on the Lung Atlas Integration project, including researchers from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Wellcome Sanger Institute, Helmholtz Munich and University Medical Center Groningen. 

Read more about how this study is part of the comprehensive international initiative Human Cell Atlas (HCA).

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