Researchers at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania revealed a powerful new bone marrow atlas that will offer the public a first-of-its-kind visual passport into the spectrum of healthy and diseased blood production. The findings were published today in the journal Cell.
„For the first time, we will have a comprehensive framework to view the full gene expression and spatial organization of bone marrow cells,“ said senior study author Kai Tan, PhD, a professor in the Department of Pediatrics and an investigator in CHOP’s Center for Childhood Cancer Research. „Although our paper is foundational, we envision the atlas will be used to develop new diagnostic tests, identify new CAR-T or other therapeutic targets, and discover spatial biomarkers of disease.“
Although spearheaded by CHOP and Penn, the study is also part of the broader Human BioMolecular Atlas Program (HuBMAP). The HuBMAP consortium is comprised of 42 diverse research teams at universities across 14 states and four countries and funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Researchers are collaborating to create the next generation of molecular analysis technologies and computational tools, which will allow researchers to create foundational tissue maps and construct an atlas of the function and relationships among cells in the human body.
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(24)00408-2
