On January 30 and 31, the Charité hosted delegates from the ESPACE partners for the project’s kick-off meeting in Berlin.
Led by Prof. Roland Eils, chair and founding director of the Digital Health Center at the BIH and Charité in Berlin, the ESPACE team planned the upcoming project activities and agreed on the first steps towards building the Human Cell Atlas of the Human Pancreas over the next two years.
Much like the Human Genome Project, which saw scientists around the world work together over decades to sequence the complete human genome, the HCA is a gigantic task that can only be achieved in a global effort. Eventually it will create a cell map of the entire human body, significantly advancing our understanding of human life.
In this context, ESPACE will closely examine cell types in the pancreas and study their gene activity to better understand how the organ functions in health and disease and feed the insights into the HCA , with the ultimate goal to improve diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment.