Mapping every cell of the human body is a top priority for scientists funded by a $3 billion investment by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, MD, a pediatrician.
The Human Cell Atlas project, which is on the scale of the Human Genome Project, is looking at 30 trillion cells to identify properties and patterns, the way cells relate to each other, and the effect of demographic differences, according to Cori Bargmann, PhD, a neuroscientist and president of science for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
Mark Zuckerberg and Dr Priscilla Chan (Source: Rex/Shutterstock)
Scientists don’t yet know how many cells have a unique function, but the answer is critical to understanding health and disease.
This research “will allow all of medicine and biology to move forward,” Dr Bargmann told the audience at the Big Data in Biomedicine 2017 Conference in Stanford, California.
The cell atlas is part of the Biohub, an independent nonprofit created to connect scientists in the San Francisco Bay Area — from Stanford University; the University of California, San Francisco; and the University of California, Berkeley — with elite engineers to put discoveries in motion. The Biohub will receive $600 million in funding.
“The brain power of these three institutions is tremendous, but they’ve never done a research project together,” Dr Bargmann explained. “There’s such an opportunity to bring people together to solve problems, and that is what the Biohub is trying to do.”
Researchers are excited about working together, said Euan Ashley, MB ChB, DPhil, associate professor of medicine and genetics at Stanford University.
Although teams have paired up before, three-way collaboration has been rare, he told Medscape Medical News, “because UCSF has medicine and Berkeley has math and engineering, whereas Stanford has both.” Also, it’s a long drive to Berkeley, he added.
The focus of the Biohub on tools and engineering as facilitators of discovery is particularly impressive, said Dr Ashley, who sees worldwide potential for the cell atlas.
“I love the investigator-centered approach to funding science. This has been shown time and again to encourage high-impact, risky research that wouldn’t be funded through other mechanisms,” he explained.
The goal of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is to “cure, prevent, or manage all diseases by the end of the century.”
That ambition might sound crazy, Dr Bargmann acknowledged, but she pointed out that the end of the century is 83 years from now. She reminded the audience what has happened in the 83 years since 1934, when there were no antibiotics, statins, or blood pressure drugs, and no understanding of the link between smoking and cancer.
Speeding Up Research
One priority of the Biohub — which is led by Stephen Quake, PhD, professor of bioengineering at Stanford University, and Joseph DeRisi, PhD, professor and biochemist at the University of California, San Francisco — is to get research results to scientists quickly through a bioarchive (bioRxiv), a fast-growing free archive and distribution service for unpublished preprints that has accumulated 10,000 papers in 3 years.
“The best way to accelerate science is to accelerate dissemination of results,” Dr Quake explained. Conventional publishing in journals can take 9 to 24 months.
Forty-seven investigators selected by the Biohub have agreed to post preprints to bioRxiv when they submit a paper to a journal.
“We know this works. This is something that has been part of the culture in physics for many decades. It feels like now is the time in biology,” Dr Quake said.
The best way to accelerate science is to accelerate dissemination of results.
It would be great if those preprints could be translated into multiple languages, said session moderator Carlos Bustamante, PhD, professor of biomedical science at Stanford University.
“Many places with low resources absolutely scour every paper before doing an experiment, so having the latest results out there probably does more to accelerate science in developing countries than anything else,” he said.
Dr Bargmann pointed out that the archive contains research that might never be published in journals.
“There’s often a lot of excitement about an initial proof of principle, but these are kind of party tricks. What it takes to turn that into something everyone can use is a lot of grit and hard work, which maybe the journals aren’t so excited about and maybe the funding agencies aren’t so excited about,” she explained. “But that is really what makes science happen.”
Dr Bargmann, Dr Quake, and Dr Bustamante have disclosed no relevant financial relationships beyond their work with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Dr Ashley has disclosed no relevant financial relationships.
Big Data in Biomedicine 2017 Conference. Presented May 24, 2017.
Follow Medscape on Twitter @Medscape and Marcia Frellick @mfrellick
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