Programme to map human body, including every cell & tissue, launched in India

Programme to map human body, including every cell & tissue, launched in India

The Manav Human Atlas project, a collaboration between IISER Pune, Persistent Systems, and the National Centre for Cell Science, has been launched today by the DBT Secretary Dr. Renu Swarup. Funded by the Department of Biotechnology, this project aims to construct a comprehensive map of the entire human body which will explicitly document macro to micro level information.

It is envisaged that Manav will dramatically accelerate our understanding of the working of the human body and help design better therapeutic targets for treating diseases like cancer, diabetes and more.

This project will require understanding, extracting and collating information from thousands of scientific papers which would need a massive investment of time, effort and workforce. The large pool of scientifically literate population in India pursuing a bachelor’s, master’s, or Ph.D. is a great resource that will be trained and engaged as part of this project to use the annotation tool being developed to collate, curate, manage and visualize this scientific information.

However, this information is scattered in different databases, repositories and in the text of journal articles. This makes the seamless extraction of scientific information an extremely challenging and time-consuming (yet incomplete) process. With 100+ databases and millions of data points (combined) from just human cells/tissue and disease, there is a pressing need to collate this information in such a way that users like academic/industrial/clinical researcher as well as teachers and students can easily access information that is relevant to them from a common and modular platform. Although there are ambitious ongoing efforts like the Recon X, The Virtual Physiological Human, Human Cell Atlas, none of these projects aim to build the map of the whole human body simultaneously comparing both macro(organ/tissue/cell) and micro (molecular interaction networks) level details.

Manav-Human Atlas Initiative aims to construct a comprehensive map of the entire human body which will explicitly document macro to micro level information. The project Manav will dramatically accelerate our understanding of the working of the human body and help design better therapeutic targets for treating diseases like cancer, diabetes and more. This project will require understanding, extracting and collating information from millions of scientific papers which would need a massive investment of time, effort and manpower. The large pool of scientifically literate population in India pursuing a bachelors /masters / Ph.D. is a great resource that will be trained and engaged as part of this project to use the annotation tool being developed to collate, curate, manage and visualize this scientific information. This project is funded by Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Government of India as a collaboration between Persistent Systems, NCCS and IISER, Pune.