Human Protein Atlas enters a new collaboration with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative aiming to promote research that will solve societal health problems. The collaborations aims to promote research on health and societal challenges related to human health.

The Human Protein Atlas at the Science for Life Laboratory (SciLifeLab) are teaming up with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to strengthen research in cell biology and proteomics.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which was founded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, provides financial and engineering support for the Human Cell Atlas, an ambitious international collaboration that aims to create a reference atlas of all cells in the healthy human body as a resource for studies of health and disease. Among the other organizations involved in the Human Cell Atlas project are leaders in single cell analysis, including the Wellcome Trust, the European Bioinformatics Institute, the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, the Karolinska Institute, SciLifeLab, the Broad Institute, the Sanger Institute and UC Santa Cruz.

"KTH and SciLifeLab will now work together with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative," says KTH Associate Professor Emma Lundberg, who leads the Human Protein Atlas' Cell Atlas project and High Content Microscopy facility at SciLifeLab. The work will be performed by Lundberg, along with Professor Mathias Uhlén and Assistant Professor Adil Mardinoglu from KTH, Dr. Jan Mulder from Karolinska Institutet and Professor Fredrik Pontén from Uppsala University.

"Together, we will integrate our respective technologies," Lundberg says. As with the Cell Atlas and the Human Protein Atlas, the resulting content will be made open and freely available to other researchers. "We will integrate new technologies such as single-cell RNA sequencing and high multiplex imaging into the spatial data already in Human Protein Atlas," she says. "This is with the hope that we can draw better conclusions about how human cells are built and create a more informative Human Protein Atlas."

Cristina Al-Khalili Szigyarto