To create comprehensive reference maps of all human cells—the fundamental units of life—as a basis for both understanding human health and diagnosing, monitoring, and treating disease.
HCA-LifeTime Alliance on COVID-19 single-cell and omics (meta-)data
All across the globe, clinicians and researchers collect rich biological datasets of clinical specimens from COVID-19 patients, each associated with important meta-data. Efforts from multiple groups have shown that combining datasets in meta-analyses helps to understand how cells in specific tissues may be affected by COVID-19. However, meta-data must be harmonized to allow statistically powered comparisons.
Many initiatives have made their data available on various platforms for the wider research community. Some organisations, like the EMBL-EBI and the Broad Institute, have provided repositories to collect COVID-19 related (meta-)data centrally.
The HCA and LifeTime provided an overview of resources for COVID-19 single-cell and omics data and meta-data that have been shared by members of their and related communities, and established a registry of researchers who are using single-cell approaches to study the disease. This project is now completed.