New York City-based Weill Cornell Medicine is partnering with life sciences technology company NanoString Technologies to create multicellular, single-cell and sub-cellular datasets and maps of 30 non-diseased organs.
The project, called the Spatial Atlas of Human Anatomy, will create a dataset of 250 million cells with the goal of creating an open-source reference for researchers, NanoString said in a Feb. 2 news release. Cells will be mapped at two spatial scales: whole transcriptome of histological features and 1,000 RNAs and 64 proteins at single cell resolution.
"The goal is for SAHA to be a foundational database that can serve as a benchmark reference for spatial precision medicine. Comparing spatial datasets of various organs from multiple ethnicities can capture the variability in samples that researchers do not currently understand," Chris Mason, PhD, professor of physiology and biophysics at Weill Cornell Medicine said in the release. "The research team plans to show how spatial organ atlasing at multiple scales can be used for uncovering unique insights into organ development, health and cancer."