The largest and most comprehensive map of human lung cells to date was published in the journal Nature Medicine on the 8th. By combining data from nearly 40 studies, an international team of researchers created the first complete single-cell atlas of the lung, revealing a rich diversity of cell types in the lung, which highlights key cellular differences between healthy and diseased lungs, Will be an invaluable resource for lung researchers.
The discovery of a common cellular state between pulmonary fibrosis, cancer and COVID-19 provides new avenues for understanding lung disease and helps identify new therapeutic targets.
The research is part of the global Human Cell Atlas (HCA) initiative, which aims to map every cell type in the human body to transform understanding of health, infection and disease.
Using advanced machine learning techniques, the research team successfully combined 49 lung datasets from nearly 40 independent studies into a single comprehensive atlas. By pooling and integrating datasets from every major single-cell RNA-sequencing lung study published to date, the team created the first integrated cellular atlas of the human lung. The atlas, which covers more than 2.4 million cells from 486 individuals, provides unprecedented new insights into lung biology.
Professor Fabian Theis, senior author of the paper and director of the Institute of Computational Biology at the Helmholtz Munich Research Center in Germany, said that the first reference map of the human lung includes data from more than 100 healthy people, revealing How an individual's cells change with age, sex and smoking history. But the latest research allows people to see rare cell types and identify new cell states that have not been discovered before.
While the Human Lung Cell Atlas has data from healthy lungs at its core, the team also extracted datasets from more than a dozen different lung diseases and projected these data onto healthy data to understand disease status.
The team also found that different lung diseases share a common immune cell state, with similar gene activity in a subpopulation of macrophages, a type of immune cell, in pulmonary fibrosis, cancer, and COVID-19. Their common status suggests that these cells may play similar roles in lung scarring in these 3 diseases and provide a reference for potential therapeutic targets.