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.
Here is the latest news about the Human Cell Atlas. We will post updates about science, meetings, funding and publications.
27 October 2022
The Human Cell Atlas consortium is now an Affiliate Member of Scholars at Risk.
21 October 2022
HCA is hosting virtual workshops to introduce Single-Cell RNA-Seq Analysis tools and techniques to researchers based in Africa, thanks to support by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
17 October 2022
The second HCA Developmental and Pediatric Cell Atlas Meeting will take place on 20 – 22 November, in Paris, France and online.
14 October 2022
The hybrid HCA Asia Meeting 2022 will be held on 3 – 4 November, in-person in Bangkok, Thailand, and virtually.
18 August 2022
The HCA 2022 General Meeting was held as a hybrid meeting in Vienna Austria and virtually, on June 27 – 29th 2022.
12 May 2022
Four multi-tissue Human Cell Atlas studies published by Science today (12 May) bring the HCA goal of mapping every cell type in the human body a milestone step closer, with highly detailed maps of over a million individual cells across 33 organs and systems.
03 February 2022
The first HCA Africa Symposium will be held virtually on 21st–22nd March 2022, with talks and discussions 11am-4.30pm GMT each day.
16 November 2021
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) has announced $28 million in grants for new Ancestry Networks for the Human Cell Atlas, supporting the inclusion of data from tissue samples from ancestrally diverse donors.
08 October 2021
The fifth Human Cell Atlas Asia Meeting will take place virtually on November 15–16th, 2021.
27 August 2021
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) has announced $33 million in grants to support 17 collaborative groups of researchers and pediatricians to contribute healthy pediatric single-cell reference data to the HCA, to better understand, prevent, and treat childhood diseases.
11 August 2021
The first HCA Developmental and Pediatric Cell Atlas meeting will take place virtually on August 25-27th, 2021.
09 March 2021
Funding has been announced by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) for new Ancestry Networks for the Human Cell Atlas. Their Request for Applications (RFA) is focused on supporting collaborative teams of researchers to contribute data from tissue samples from ancestrally diverse donors to the HCA.
25 February 2021
The next Human Cell Atlas General Meeting will take place virtually, on June 28 – 30th, 2021. Please hold the dates in your calendar.
We intend to schedule main sessions between 9:00am-1:00pm EST each day. We will also record talks and make them available shortly later for viewing on the event platform.
19 January 2021
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) has announced funding for new Pediatric Networks for the Human Cell Atlas. Their Request for Applications (RFA) will support collaborative teams of researchers to contribute healthy, single-cell reference data from pediatric tissue samples to the HCA.
17 January 2021
The NIH have increased the funding and anticipated number of awards available for RFA-MH-21-140, “BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network (BICCN) Scalable Technologies and Tools for Brain Cell Census. This Request for Applications will help towards creating a Human Brain Cell Atlas.
10 June 2020
We, the Organizing Committee and Equity Working Group of the Human Cell Atlas initiative, express our solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. We reaffirm our responsibility and commitment to ensuring that our scientific work is equitable, and that it does not exploit, harm, or ignore people of color and other underrepresented groups, both in the US and worldwide. Further, we pledge to continue to actively engage scientists from marginalized communities around the world, collecting data — with appropriate ethical approvals and informed consent — which accurately represent the full spectrum of human diversity. We realize that systemic racism takes many forms in different parts of the world, and are committed to adapting our approaches to represent and uplift disadvantaged people in their home countries and across the globe.
05 June 2020
Description: This seminar is part of a series that is intended to support scientific discussion around how Human Cell Atlas mapping with single-cell genomics, imaging, and computational technologies can be integrated into developmental biology research and drive innovation in pediatric and adult medical care.
08 May 2020
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) has announced $750,000 in funding to support five projects studying how COVID-19 progresses in patients at the level of individual cells and tissues. This will help support the HCA-COVID-19 effort.
23 April 2020
The HCA community, in partnership with disease consortia, is committed to contributing our scientific expertise to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Our work and resources to date are available at https://www.humancellatlas.org/covid-19/
02 April 2020
The White House announced the launch of the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium to provide COVID-19 researchers worldwide with access to the world’s most powerful high performance computing resources that can significantly advance the pace of scientific discovery in the fight to stop the virus.
31 March 2020
The virtual NIH-HCA Joint Meeting plenary meeting will continue today. Don’t forget to tag your self attending the virtual meeting #NIHHCA2020
30 March 2020
Unfortunately, due to the substantial uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Development and Pediatric Cell Atlas Program Committee has decided to postpone the meeting to a later date.
30 March 2020
The virtual NIH-HCA Joint Meeting is taking place today. Tag yourself participating in the virtual meeting #NIHHCA2020.
29 March 2020
The NIH-HCA Joint Meeting is starting tomorrow, 30 March 2020. If you have registered for the meeting, check your inboxes for teleconference information or email meetings@humancellatlas.org.
24 March 2020
One week until the virtual NIH-HCA Joint Meeting 30-31 March.
06 March 2020
Due to the evolving situation and associated travel restrictions related to the global spread of COVID-19, we have decided to convert the NIH-HCA 2020 Joint Meeting from a face-to-face meeting to a virtual 2-day meeting to take place on March 30-31, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. EDT.
04 February 2020
The Human Cell Atlas Development and Pediatric Cell Atlas Meeting and Single-Cell Genomics Public Symposium will take place July 6 – 8, 2020, at the MaRS Discovery District in Toronto, Canada, hosted by Medicine by Design at the University of Toronto
29 January 2020
We are currently oversubscribed for in-person attendance, and therefore, cannot register additional people at this time. However, we encourage our community members to join us for the live broadcast, which will be posted to the meeting website in the coming weeks.
To register for remote participation, click here.
We hope you can join us!
27 October 2019
The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust announced $13 million in new grants to create a Gut Cell Atlas, cataloguing the many cell types in the small and large intestines.
18 September 2019
Human Cell Atlas Asia (HCA Asia) was formed in 2017 to create a coordinated platform for researchers based in Asia to collaborate, share data and plan future initiatives for the HCA. Our goals and framework are broadly aligned with those of the global HCA community. We aim to create comprehensive reference maps of all human cells in Asia as a basis for both understanding human health, as well as diagnosing, monitoring, and treating disease.
14 September 2019
The meeting’s theme is “Building the Human Cell Atlas Roadmap.” We will explore how to build out draft roadmaps for the various organ atlases in plenary and breakout sessions. We will also include interactive demos of HCA datasets in action and have a technical focus on spatial genomics.
11 September 2019
The Human Cell Atlas Equity Meeting will be held on October 31, 2019 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The meeting’s goal is to help introduce the HCA, and the transformative opportunities it may afford, to the global health community, as well as to consider fundamental compositional, organizational, and educational goals for the HCA.
28 August 2019
Open registration is now FULL.
27 August 2019
Open registration for the 10-11 October 2019, Human Cell Atlas Meeting in Barcelona Spain will go live on Wednesday 28 August, at 05:00. EST
14 August 2019
The 8th Human Cell Atlas Meeting will take place on October 10 – 11, 2019 at CosmoCaixa [cosmocaixa.es], in Barcelona, Spain.
07 August 2019
We are delighted to announce travel scholarships for HCA Data contributors for the upcoming October 10 & 11, 2019, Human Cell Atlas Meeting to be held in Barcelona, Spain. These scholarships follow the posting of the new HCA Data Release Policy, which encourages data submission prior to publication in a peer-reviewed journal (no accession number available). To support and encourage the community along this path, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will provide a one-time incentive to reimburse travel for members of the community who contribute pre-publication data to the HCA DCP. A subset of scholarship winners will also be selected to give a short talk at the meeting.
27 June 2019
The next Human Cell Atlas General Assembly Meeting will take place in Barcelona, Spain from the 10-11 October 2019
Please hold the dates in your calendar and feel free to reach out to meetings@humancellatlas.org for any questions.
21 June 2019
New grants support networks of scientists from diverse disciplines who study a variety of healthy human organs
16 May 2019
Hosted by the RIKEN Institute and kindly supported by The Kavli Foundation and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
18 April 2019
Tokyo, Japan – Hosted by RIKEN
Remote registration for Japan HCA meeting now live
12 December 2018
The next Human Cell Atlas General Assembly Meeting will take place in Tokyo, Japan from the 23-24 May 2019
11 December 2018
The MRC has announced that it is investing £6.7 million to support the UK’s contribution to the Human Cell Atlas initiative.
10 October 2018
Hosted by the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard with support from The Kavli Foundation.
09 October 2018
The Human Cell Atlas is a global, open, and collaborative scientific community committed to the principles of diversity, inclusion, and equity. To date, more than 1,000 researchers from 584 institutes in 55 countries have registered to be part of our effort. A key component of our initiative is a series of regular meetings held on a rotating basis among several countries, to maximize participation, engagement and interaction as we plan and execute the collection of the atlas.
24 September 2018
The Medical Research Council has launched a £5.5m funding opportunity for UK-based researchers to contribute to the Human Cell Atlas through single-cell gene expression analysis and imaging. The competition is open to groups with access to healthy human tissue, and there is an opportunity to receive additional embryonic and foetal tissue for comparative analysis.
23 September 2018
The Helmsley Charitable Trust’s Crohn’s Disease Program is excited to announce a new funding opportunity.
23 September 2018
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) and the Helmsley Charitable Trust (Helmsley) are pleased to announce continued support for the Human Cell Atlas (HCA) by collaborating on two new funding mechanisms that will continue the work of the HCA community both accessed through this single application portal.
06 September 2018
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative invites applications for five-year grants to support Imaging Scientists employed in imaging centers at non-profit universities or university-affiliated research institutes within the United States.
21 August 2018
COMING SOON: A COLLABORATIVE REQUEST FOR APPLICATIONS (RFA)
The Helmsley Charitable Trust and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) are partnering to support the continued development of the Human Cell Atlas, an international effort to map all cells in the human body. Full RFA and application instructions for 3-year projects will be posted in early September and a common application portal will be open September 18 – November 13, 2018.
09 August 2018
First funding from Wellcome
08 August 2018
Following the recent EC H2020 call [SC1-BHC-31-2019: Pilot actions to build the foundations of a human cell atlas], the International Human Cell Atlas Consortium would like to offer to assist with match-making consortium members.
19 April 2018
Genetic profiles of human and mouse cells have now been posted on the Human Cell Atlas online portal.
19 April 2018
Genetic profiles of human and mouse cells have now been posted on the Human Cell Atlas online portal.
08 March 2018
Researchers from the global Human Cell Atlas Consortium are taking the first steps towards using powerful single-cell genome analysis tools to understand early human development and how this can affect health or lead to disease. Preliminary projects for the Human Developmental Cell Atlas (HDCA) have sequenced a quarter of a million separate cells so far and the first tranche of data analysis is underway.
18 October 2017
In October 2016, the Human Cell Atlas (HCA) initiative launched its planning process. The following year was spent by the HCA community laying out the best way to build such an Atlas while ensuring high-quality, open-access data and global equity. This initial planning phase of meetings, discussions, and early pilot projects has now culminated in the release of the Human Cell Atlas white paper.
18 October 2017
The Human Cell Atlas (HCA) Consortium has released a blueprint for the international initiative’s efforts to create a comprehensive reference map of all human cells, a project that will form the basis for a deeper understanding of human health and for diagnosing, monitoring, and treating disease.
17 October 2017
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is funding 38 pilot projects to help build new technologies, best practices, and data analysis techniques for the Human Cell Atlas.
11 October 2017
The next Human Cell Atlas meeting will happen at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel next week.
25 July 2017
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative invites applications for one year projects to develop computational tools, algorithms, visualizations, and benchmark datasets in support of the Human Cell Atlas. Participants in this project will collaborate with each other and with Chan Zuckerberg Initiative scientists and engineers to accelerate progress, facilitate communication, and maximize open dissemination of the resulting tools.
17 March 2017
Following on from the successful meeting held in California in February, the Human Cell Atlas community is planning two further meetings.
15 March 2017
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative invites applications for one year pilot projects to develop technologies for the Human Cell Atlas, establish best practices in the field, and begin a common data archive for analysis and investigation.
16 December 2016
The next Human Cell Atlas meeting will be held at Stanford University on 23-24 February 2017, hosted by The Chan Zuckerberg Biohub and Chan Zuckerberg Science.
10 October 2016
A group of leading biomedical researchers from around the world is undertaking a pioneering effort to describe the cells in the human body.