Human Cell Atlas Project Can Have a Big Impact on Future Healthcare

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM:
Sarah Amalia Teichmann, a pioneering scientist in the field of cellular genetics and stem cell medicine, today said the Human Cell Atlas (HCA) project she is leading has the potential to help engineer cells for research and therapeutic purposes, which can offer new insights in diagnosing, monitoring and treating diseases.

Teichmann, the current India Academy of Sciences Raman Chair, was delivering a lecture on “Mapping Molecules to Cells’ at BRIC-Rajiv Gandhi Centre for Biotechnology (RGCB), as part of the Public Series Lecture organized by India Academy of Sciences.

Prof. Partha Majumder, National Science Chair, Govt. of India and RGCB director Prof Chandrabhas Narayana were present at the session.

“Human Cell Atlas has the potential to help us engineer cells for research and therapeutic purposes. For utilizing this potential, we first need to understand the molecular basis of cells in our body and we need to define the cell types in our body. If we can achieve this, we have the potential to restore tissues, engineer cells, and that would be a revolution,” Teichmann said while explaining the advancemade in the field of genomics.

“The mission of HCA is to create a comprehensive reference map of the types and properties of our cells, the fundamental units of life, as a basis for understanding our bodies, understanding ourselves and get new insights into physiology, tissue function, and also for application in diagnosing, monitoring and treating diseases,” noted Teichmann who is also the Chair of Stem Cell Medicine at the University of Cambridge, about the globally inclusive interdisciplinary human cell mapping process.

HCA is a consortium co-founded by Teichmann and her team in 2016 to create comprehensive reference maps of all human cells. “HCA is focused on creating the reference map of the healthy human cell and this is already enabling major biomedical advancements. With this reference map we can compare and integrate disease data with a healthy reference state of our cells and understand in detail what changes are occurring,” she said.

Teichmann also explained how the mapping helps in understanding the virus entry points in humans.

“HCA can act as a guidebook, and will be valuable and purposeful in understanding viral entry factors. This knowledge can enable us to ask questions not only on viral entry factors, where are genes expressed involved for rare diseases and common diseases, where our hormone receptors are, where our drug targets expressed-which can impart knowledge on side effects and toxicities,” Teichmann said on her research during Covid 19.

“So this project that we are building together with scientists around the world including India will have a huge impact in bio medical advancement,”she said. The journal Nature has published a series of 40 scientific discoveries as the first draft of the whole human cell atlas.

Raman Chair was instituted by Govt of India in memory of scientist Sir CV Raman in 1972. Raman chair was previously occupied by eminent scientists including Nobel laureates Prof. J. B. Goodenough, Prof. Harold E Varmus, Prof. Ben L Feringa, Prof. Dorothy Hodgkin and Prof. B. S. Blumberg.