Friday, June 09, 2023

AMERIKA
Editorial: Your tax dollars at work ... suppressing women

2023/06/09
Signage outside the Planned Parenthood Reproductive Health Services Center in St. Louis, Missouri on June 24, 2022. - 
ANGELA WEISS/GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/TNS

Missouri’s political leaders have already reached into the personal medical decisions of women across the state, and have attempted to reach into the ballot process to prevent the public from reversing the state’s extremist abortion ban. Now they’re also reaching into Missourians’ very pockets, in a few different ways, using tax dollars to continue to push ideologically based anti-choice messages that polls show majorities of Missourians don't want.

What exactly is the point of spending potentially more than $1 million in state funds over the next four years on a marketing campaign designed to convince women not to seek abortions, when that choice is currently almost entirely illegal in Missouri anyway? And what is the justification for spending millions more on tax credits to reimburse citizens for donations made to anti-abortion organizations that employ sometimes controversial methods?

Literally minutes after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, Missouri became the first state in America to institute a sweeping new abortion ban. It is as stringent as any in the nation, banning the procedure from the moment of conception in all cases (rape and incest included), except in vaguely defined “medical emergencies.” Doctors who violate the ban can face up to 15 years in prison.

Before and since that law was enacted, the Legislature’s Republican majority has signaled its intention to get even more radical in its determination to deny women their biological autonomy. Among the more chilling ideas thrown around in the state Capitol are to prosecute women themselves, instead of just doctors; to somehow extend Missouri’s ban so that it covers Missouri women even when they leave the state; and to censor what women can see and read about abortion services. Some have even suggested abortion should be a death-penalty offense.

Mindful that this level of extremism doesn’t generally fly even in a red state like Missouri, lawmakers in the recent legislative session also attempted to rewrite the state’s rules regarding ballot referendums, to require supermajority approval instead of just a simple majority of the voters to change the state constitution.

Disingenuous explanations aside, there is no doubt the aim was to prevent Missouri’s voters from rolling back the state’s abortion ban — and there is just as little doubt they will keep trying.

But in their continuing campaign against choice, the state’s leaders aren’t only using their governmental powers. They’re also using tax funds, much of it collected from the very women whose rights they’re suppressing.

As the Post-Dispatch’s Kurt Erickson reports, one element of this is a $266,000 contract signed in April by Gov. Mike Parson’s administration for services from a Columbia marketing firm to help market the state’s existing “Alternatives to Abortion” program.

That $8.3 million program provides adoption assistance, child and infant care and other help to low-income mothers — which, it could be argued, is a virtual obligation for a state that is making young, poor women’s lives significantly harder and more dangerous with its abortion ban.

But the program also works with “pregnancy centers” of the kind that critics say mislead women into thinking they’re getting unbiased medical advice when they’re actually being coaxed to carry out pregnancies whether it’s in their best interests or not.

A look at the online presence of the program’s new marketing contractor, Choose Life Marketing, confirms it is a religiously focused organization that is as much about convincing women not to obtain abortions as it is about merely connecting them with support services. Support is one thing; proselytizing on the taxpayers’ dime is quite another. And, again, abortion is already illegal in Missouri anyway, so this is a curious way to spend public money.

If there’s an upside to the marketing contract, it’s that around $1 million in taxpayer funding to push right-wing political ideology is better than doing it with $7 million. That’s about how much Missouri taxpayers lost last year in tax credits that the state gives to people who donate money to pregnancy centers and other anti-abortion entities, according to a ProPublica analysis.

Would perhaps some of this money be better spent on women's health services that don’t come with an underlying mission of convincing them to make choices that serve someone else’s ideological agenda instead of their own health?

© St. Louis Post-Dispatch



US Chamber of Commerce sues over government's drug pricing power

Reuters
June 9, 2023

Pharmaceuticals:Drugs (AFP)


By Jonathan Stempel

(Reuters) - The U.S. Chamber of Commerce on Friday sued the federal government, challenging a new law that for the first time gives Medicare the power to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies.

In a complaint filed in federal court in Dayton, Ohio, the chamber said the pricing program violated drugmakers' due process rights under the U.S. Constitution by giving the government "unfettered discretion" to dictate maximum prices.

It also said the program would impose exorbitant penalties on drugmakers that don't accept those prices, and amounted to an ultimatum: "agree to whatever price the government names, or we'll smash up your business."

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which administers Medicare through its Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Friday's lawsuit by the chamber, one of the most powerful U.S. business groups, came three days after Merck & Co filed a similar lawsuit in Washington, D.C.

Both lawsuits contended that price controls would force drugmakers to pull back on developing new drugs, causing long-term harm to Americans and their health.

Other drugmakers have also objected to the pricing program, which is part of last year's Inflation Reduction Act. Pricing changes following negotiations on 10 costly drugs selected by CMS would take effect in 2026.

Americans pay more for prescription drugs than prices in any other country.

The Biden administration hopes to save $25 billion annually by 2031 by having Medicare, the government health plan for people 65 and over, negotiate prices.

White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said on Tuesday the government was confident it would win the Merck case.

"There is nothing in the Constitution that prevents Medicare from negotiating lower drug prices," she said.

The chamber also warned that allowing the pricing program would set a bad precedent.

"After all, if the government can impose price controls in the pharmaceutical industry, why not elsewhere?" Chief Policy Officer Neil Bradley said in a statement.

The case is Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce et al v Becerra et al, U.S. District Court, Southern District of Ohio, No. 23-00156.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

Shirley Ryan AbilityLab receives $8.7 Million NIH grant for first-of-its-kind bionic arm osseointegration study


Study has potential to restore sensation for those with upper-limb amputations

Grant and Award Announcement

SHIRLEY RYAN ABILITYLAB




Today, an estimated 41,000 people in the United States live with the loss of an upper limb, including hundreds of service men and women. Although significant progress has been made in the durability, control and function of upper-limb prosthetic devices, they lack complete integration into the body and, importantly, do not enable their users to feel.

Now, with the award of an $8.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Shirley Ryan AbilityLab — the top-ranked physical medicine and rehabilitation hospital — and its research partners have an opportunity to significantly advance the field of bionics by applying osseointegration in a novel manner.

Osseointegration is a technique whereby a metal implant is surgically attached to a person’s residual bone. The implant then becomes an integrated extension of the body — providing a direct attachment between the bionic and residual limb. Then, a special system called e-OPRA (Enhanced Osseoanchored Prostheses for the Rehabilitation of Amputees) uses electrodes implanted into muscle to provide robust sensory feedback through peripheral nerve stimulation, restoring the feeling of touch.

The study is the first to combine osseointegration, targeted muscle reinnervation (TMR) and pattern-recognition control using implanted electromyographic (EMG) sensors. (TMR is a revolutionary surgical technique — that was developed by collaborators at Northwestern Medicine and Shirley Ryan AbilityLab — to allow those with amputations control of bionic prostheses.) It also is the first in-home trial of the e-OPRA system in people with upper-limb amputations who have had TMR surgery and use a Coapt Gen2 pattern recognition–controlled myoelectric prosthesis.  

“With this combination of novel and advanced technologies, the device should feel much more like a person’s actual limb,” said Levi Hargrove, the study’s lead researcher and director of the Regenstein Foundation Center for Bionic Medicine at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab. “This study builds on many years of our
leadership in bionic medicine, and marks a significant step forward in making this intuitive technology broadly available for the first time.”

As part of the study, Shirley Ryan Ability is partnering with Integrum, a Swedish company that invented the osseointegration technique, and Northwestern Medicine, which will implant the device and perform TMR surgery on eight research subjects. Researchers at UChicagoMedicine and Bionics Institute in Australia also will support the study.

Following the surgeries, the research team will lead two clinical trials to evaluate the comfort and function with implanted electrodes through e-OPRA — compared to and combined with the state-of-the-art clinical solution using Coapt’s Gen2 pattern recognition system — and to evaluate the effects of providing sensory feedback.

“Engineers, material scientists, neurophysiologists and surgeons have never before come together on this scale to apply osseointegration in this manner,” said Rickard Branemark, CEO and founder of Integrum AB. “We are very excited to collaborate on this important work.”

The five-year grant is being funded through the NIH’s UG3 and UH3 mechanisms, which specifically are targeted to translating groundbreaking neural technologies for patients.

The award comes on the heels of another, recently funded $1.5 million U.S. Department of Defense grant for Shirley Ryan AbilityLab and its research collaborators to evaluate functional mobility, neural control and user satisfaction as they relate to osseointegration in bionic legs.

About Shirley Ryan AbilityLab

Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, formerly the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC), is the global leader in physical medicine and rehabilitation for adults and children with the most severe, complex conditions — from traumatic brain and spinal cord injury to stroke, amputation and cancer-related impairment. The organization expands and accelerates leadership in the field that began at RIC in 1953. The quality of its care has led to the designation of “No. 1 Rehabilitation Hospital in America” by U.S. News & World Report every year since 1991. Upon opening in March 2017, the $550 million, 1.2-million-square-foot Shirley Ryan AbilityLab became the first-ever “translational” research hospital in which clinicians, scientists, innovators and technologists work together in the same space, surrounding patients, discovering new approaches and applying (or “translating”) research real time. This unique model enables patients to have 24/7 access to the brightest minds, the latest research and the best opportunity for recovery. Shirley Ryan AbilityLab is a 501 (c)(3) nonprofit organization. For more information, go to www.sralab.org

 

About Integrum

Integrum AB is a publicly traded company (INTEG B: Nasdaq First North Growth Market) based outside of Gothenburg, Sweden, with a U.S. subsidiary in San Francisco, CA. Since 1990, osseointegration, the science behind the OPRA™ Implant System, has been helping individuals with amputations enjoy a dramatically improved quality of life. Thorough surgical experience gained over more than three decades, from more than 500 surgeries, in 14 countries, has led to the development of Integrum’s system for bone-anchored prostheses — a vastly superior alternative to the traditionally used socket prosthesis. For more information, please visit www.integrum.se.

 

Ground-breaking findings bring hope for faster and better recovery after stroke


Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF GOTHENBURG

Strokerehab. 

IMAGE: REHABILITATION AFTER STROKE. view more 

CREDIT: PHOTO: UNIVERSITY OF GOTHENBURG




An effective treatment for most stroke victims — even those who, today, are unable to gain access to care within the first few hours. This is the goal of an experimental method that has been tested with great success in an international study headed by the University of Gothenburg.

The work now published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation is a multicenter study in which researchers at the Universities of Gothenburg and Cologne implemented parallel testing of an experimental stroke treatment on mice. The study was conducted in collaboration with researchers at the Czech Academy of Sciences.

By giving mice a molecule, the complement peptide C3a, in nasal drops, the scientists saw them recover motor function faster and better after stroke compared with mice that had received nasal drops with placebo. These results confirm and extend a previous study at the University of Gothenburg and the current study design further strengthens their credibility.

“We see the same positive effects in experiments done in Sweden and in Germany, which makes the results much more robust,” says Marcela Pekna, Professor of Neuroimmunology at Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, who led the study.

No racing against time

One crucial point is that the treatment was not initiated until seven days after the stroke. In a conceivable future, most stroke patients could thus be included — even those who do not reach hospital in time or who, for other reasons, are not helped by clot-dissolving drugs (thrombolysis) or mechanical clot removal (thrombectomy).

“With this method, there’s no need to race against the clock. If the treatment is used in clinical practice, all stroke patients could receive it, even those who arrive at the hospital too late for thrombolysis or thrombectomy. Those who have remaining disability after the clot is removed could improve with this treatment too,” Pekna says.

The study demonstrates not only very distinct positive effects, but also identifies the underlying cellular and molecular processes in the brain. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) showed that the treatment with C3a peptide increased the formation of new connections among nerve cells in the mouse brains.

Mechanisms clarified

Milos Pekny, Professor at the Department of Clinical Neuroscience at Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, participated in the study.

“Our results show,” he says, “that the C3a peptide affects the function of astrocytes — that is, cells that control many of the nerve cells' functions in both the healthy and the diseased brain — and which signals astrocytes send to nerve cells.”

Despite advances in emergency care, the most common form of stroke, ischemic stroke, is still a major cause of long-term disability, including impaired speech and mobility. The researchers emphasize that stroke treatment is not solely a matter of prompt interventions in the first hours after symptom onset.

“There is great potential for substantial improvement even at a later stage. Since the molecule was administered in nasal drops, the treatment could be given at home by relatives or the patients themselves,” Pekny says.

Timing is also of importance when it comes to the C3a peptide treatment. If the molecule is given too soon, it might increase the amount of inflammatory cells in the brain. The study also shows that the positive outcomes in experimental animals persist long after the treatment is discontinued.

“The good effect remains,” Pekna says, “and that is important. It means that this is real. And we know more about how the C3a peptide works. Our ambition is to develop the method to make it usable in clinical practice, but to get there, and especially to be able to carry out the necessary clinical trials, we need to team up with a partner in the pharmaceutical industry,” she concludes.

Astrocytes are cells that control many of the nerve cells' functions in both the healthy and the diseased brain.

CREDIT

Photo: University of Gothenburg.

Sleep apnoea link to cognitive decline raises need for targeted treatment options


Peer-Reviewed Publication

FLINDERS UNIVERSITY

Associate Professor Andrew Vakulin 

IMAGE: ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR ANDREW VAKULIN IS SEARCHING FOR SOLUTIONS TO SLEEP DISORDERS WITH THE FLINDERS HEALTH AND MEDICAL RESEARCH INSTITUTE SLEEP HEALTH GROUP. view more 

CREDIT: THE HOSPITAL RESEARCH FOUNDATION



Flinders University experts are working on better solutions for sleep apnoea to ward off a range of health risks, including cognitive decline.

Improved solutions for obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA), insomnia and other sleep disorders are being developed by the Flinders Sleep Health experts to reduce the associated negative health effects such as cardiovascular harm, diabetes, anxiety and depression and even long-term cognitive decline.

Heightened risk of cognitive function decline from undiagnosed OSA – particularly in middle-aged men living in the community – is the focus of one of the latest studies published in Sleep Health.

The study recorded the sleep patterns of more than 470 men aged from 41-87 years along side their daytime cognitive function for processing speed, visual attention, episodic memory recollection and other markers.

Measuring distinct features of brain electrical activity during non-REM sleep, called ‘sleep spindles’, the study aimed to explore if these features can serve as markers of cognitive function.

“Non-REM sleep includes light stage 1 and 2 sleep, as well as deeper stage 3 sleep which is thought to play an important role in learning and memory,” says Flinders University sleep researcher Dr Jesse Parker.

“Our study found cross-sectional associations between various domains of next-day cognitive function and several sleep spindle metrics during stage 2 and stage 3 of their sleep cycle.

“The presence and severity of OSA was an important factor in this relationship.”

While standard clinical tests for OSA may detect and help to improve this common sleep-related breathing disorder with interventions such as continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) or specific dental devices, the condition does vary between people depending on gender, age and other factors.

Based on this latest Florey Adelaide Male Ageing Study results, the Flinders Health and Medical Research Institute Sleep Health researchers recommend long-term investigations into sleep spindle phases and OSA to improve future treatments – and to determine whether OSA interventions such as CPAP do improve sleep quality and cognitive function.

Sleep apnoea affects more than 1 billion people globally and if untreated or severe may increase the risk of dementia and Parkinson’s disease, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, anxiety and depression, reduced quality of life, traffic accidents and all-cause mortality, previous research has found. In Australia alone, the economic cost associated with poor sleep including sleep disorders has been estimated at $66 billion a year.

“Poor sleep as a result of OSA, as well as delayed sleep and body clock disruption, may lead to chronic health conditions, including cognitive impairment, poor mental health and cardiovascular disease,” says Associate Professor Andrew Vakulin, senior author on the publication and Flinders Health and Medical Research Institute (FHMRI) Sleep Health researcher.

“Highlighting the need for better treatments, our latest studies not only make more links between sleep disorders and poor health outcomes but also the need for tailored specific treatments for individual cases, including co-occurring conditions such as insomnia and sleep apnoea.

"Along with uncontrolled hypertension, this latest study also clearly links cognitive function to sleep in adult males, possibly made worse by undiagnosed moderate to severe OSA,” says Associate Professor Vakulin

The article, The association between sleep spindles and cognitive function in middle-aged and older men from a community-based cohort study (2023) by Jesse Parker, Sarah L Appleton, Robert J Adams, Yohannes Adama Melaku, Angela d’Rozario, Gary A Wittert, Sean Martin, Peter G Catcheside, Bastien Lechat, Alison Jane Teare, Barbara Toson and Andrew Vakulin has been published in Sleep Health. DOI:  10.1016/j.sleh.2023.03.007

Also, Associations of Baseline Sleep Microarchitecture with Cognitive Function After 8 Years in Middle-Aged and Older Men from a Community-Based Cohort Study (2023) published in Nature and Science of Sleep DOI: 10.2147/NSS.S401655

Acknowledgements: The work was supported by the Australian NHMRC and Hospital Research Foundation grants, as well as the ResMed Foundation, USA for the EEG analysis.

The Flinders Health and Medical Research Institute Sleep Health group is also investigating other interventions to tackle sleep apnea including a range of clinical trials of alternative drug therapies – including the publications at the links below:

From novel devices and cognitive behavioural therapy to complementary muscle, sedative and other drug treatments, the latest round of studies from Flinders Sleep Health group are exploring more targeted treatments.

 

Colorful foods improve athletes’ vision

Visual range is a critical asset for top athletes in almost any sport

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA

Nutrition is an important part of any top athlete’s training program. And now, a new study by researchers from the University of Georgia proposes that supplementing the diet of athletes with colorful fruits and vegetables could improve their visual range.

The paper, which was published in Exercise and Sport Sciences Reviews, examines how a group of plant compounds that build up in the retina, known as macular pigments, work to improve eye health and functional vision.

Previous studies done by UGA researchers Billy R. Hammond and Lisa Renzi-Hammond have shown that eating foods like dark leafy greens or yellow and orange vegetables, which contain high levels of the plant compounds lutein and zeaxanthin, improves eye and brain health.

“A lot of the research into macular lutein and zeaxanthin has focused on health benefits, but from a functional perspective, higher concentrations of these plant pigments improve many aspects of visual and cognitive ability. In this paper, we discuss their ability to improve vision in the far distance or visual range,” said lead author Jack Harth, a doctoral candidate in UGA’s College of Public Health.

Visual range, or how well a person can see a target clearly over distance, is a critical asset for top athletes in almost any sport.

The reason why objects get harder to see and appear fuzzier the farther they are from our eyes is thanks in part to the effects of blue light.

“From a center fielder's perspective, if that ball's coming up in the air, it will be seen against a background of bright blue sky, or against a gray background if it's a cloudy day. Either way, the target is obscured by atmospheric interference coming into that path of the light,” said Harth.

Many athletes already take measures to reduce the impact of blue light through eye black or blue blocker sunglasses, but eating more foods rich in lutein and zeaxanthin can improve the eye’s natural ability to handle blue light exposure, said Harth.

When a person absorbs lutein and zeaxanthin, the compounds collect as yellow pigments in the retina and act as a filter to prevent blue light from entering the eye.

Previous work had been done testing the visual range ability of pilots in the 1980s, and Hammond and Renzi-Hammond have done more recent studies on how macular pigment density, or how much yellow pigment is built up in the retina, is linked to a number of measures of eye health and functional vision tests.

“In a long series of studies, we have shown that increasing amounts of lutein and zeaxanthin in the retina and brain decrease glare disability and discomfort and improve chromatic contrast and visual-motor reaction time, and supplementing these compounds facilitates executive functions like problem-solving and memory. All of these tasks are particularly important for athletes,” said corresponding author Billy R. Hammond, a professor of psychology in the Behavior and Brain Sciences Program at UGA’s Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.

This paper, Harth said, brings the research on these links between macular pigment and functional vision up to date and asks what the evidence suggests about optimizing athletic performance.

“We're at a point where we can say we've seen visual range differences in pilots that match the differences found in modeling, and now, we've also seen it in laboratory tests, and a future goal would be to actually bring people outside and to measure their ability to see contrast over distance through real blue haze and in outdoor environments,” said Harth.

But before you start chowing down on kale in the hopes of improving your game, he cautions that everybody is different. That could mean the way our bodies absorb and use lutein and zeaxanthin varies, and it could take a while before you notice any improvements, if at all.

Still, the evidence of the overall health benefits of consuming more lutein and zeaxanthin are reason enough to add more color to your diet, say the authors.

“We have data from modeling and empirical studies showing that higher macular pigment in your retina will improve your ability to see over distance. The application for athletes is clear,” said Harth.

 

Single-cell atlas of the whole human lung


First integrated Human Lung Cell Atlas provides insights into lung diseases

Peer-Reviewed Publication

WELLCOME TRUST SANGER INSTITUTE

The largest and most comprehensive cell map of the human lung is announced in Nature Medicine today (8 June).  Revealing the great diversity of cell types in the lung and key differences between health and disease, the Human Lung Cell Atlas will be a valuable resource for lung researchers.


By combining data from nearly 40 studies, researchers created the first integrated single-cell atlas of the lung, revealing rare cell types and highlighting cellular differences between healthy people. In addition, the study found common cell states between lung fibrosis, cancer and COVID-19, offering new ways of understanding lung disease, which could help identify new therapeutic targets.

The study is part of the global Human Cell Atlas* (HCA) initiative to map every cell type in the human body, to transform our understanding of health, infection and disease.

Lung research has benefited greatly from recent single-cell studies that show which genes are active in each cell. Despite this, the research has been limited so far by the number of samples and individuals included per study. To better understand healthy lungs and determine what goes wrong in disease, a comprehensive atlas has been needed, however this has been difficult to achieve.

Now, a large team of researchers has successfully combined 49 lung datasets, from nearly 40 separate studies, into a single integrated Atlas, using advanced machine learning.  By pooling and integrating datasets from every major single-cell RNA-sequencing lung study published to date, the team created the first integrated Human Lung Cell Atlas. This Atlas spans over 2.4 million cells from 486 individuals and gives new insights into lung biology that were not possible before.

Dr Malte Luecken, a senior author on the paper and Group leader at the Institute of Computational Biology and the Institute of Lung Health and Immunity at Helmholtz Munich, Germany, said: “A comprehensive organ atlas requires many datasets to capture the diversity between both cells and individuals, but combining different datasets is a huge challenge. We developed a benchmarking pipeline to find the optimal method to integrate all datasets into the Atlas, using artificial intelligence, and successfully combined knowledge and data from almost 40 previous lung studies.”

Professor Fabian Theis, a senior author on the paper and Director of the Institute of Computational Biology at Helmholtz Munich, said: “We have created a first reference atlas of the human lung, which includes data from more than a hundred healthy people and reveals how the cells from individuals vary with age, sex, and smoking history. The sheer numbers of cells and individuals involved now gives the power to see rare cell types and identify new cell states that have not previously been described.”

While the core of the Human Lung Cell Atlas is data from healthy lungs, the team also took datasets from more than 10 different lung diseases and projected these onto the healthy data, to understand disease states.

The team discovered that different lung diseases shared common immune cell states, including the finding that a subset of macrophages (a type of immune cell) shared similar gene activity in lung fibrosis, cancer and COVID-19. The shared states indicate that these cells could play a similar role in scar formation in the lung in all three diseases, and provide pointers for potential therapeutic targets. 

Professor Martijn Nawijn, a senior author on the paper and Professor at the University Medical Center Groningen, the Netherlands, said: “This is the first effort to compare healthy and diseased lungs in one study in an integrated way.  Our study not only supports the presence of lung fibrosis in COVID-19, it allows us to identify and define a shared cell state between lung fibrosis, COVID-19 and lung cancer patients.  Finding these shared disease-associated cells is really exciting, and reveals a totally different way of looking at lung diseases, opening possibilities for novel treatment targets and developing treatment response biomarkers. Our findings also suggest that therapies working for one disease may help alleviate others.”

The Lung Atlas Integration project was an international collaborative effort with nearly 100 partners from more than 60 departments, including key researchers from Helmholtz Munich, University Medical Center Groningen and Northwestern University. The team are part of the Human Cell Atlas Lung Biological Network**, which has its roots in the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Seed Networks for the Human Cell Atlas, and the European Union funded lung network DiscovAIR. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the single-cell lung communities came together rapidly, forming the HCA Lung Biological Network to help understand COVID-19, which then led to the global effort to integrate all the data.

Lisa Sikkema, the first author on the paper and PhD student at the Institute of Computational Biology at Helmholtz Munich, said: “One of the big problems in creating the integrated lung cell atlas was with cell type annotation. Different research groups used different names for the same cell type, or the same name for different cells, so as a team we worked to standardise them using the data in the atlas. The atlas is a first step towards a consensus annotation of the human lung, which will help bring together the field of lung research.”

The first integrated major organ within the Human Cell Atlas initiative, the Human Lung Cell Atlas is publically available for researchers globally, as a central resource to study the lung in health and disease.

Dr Alexander Misharin, a senior author on the paper and Associate Professor at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, USA, said: “The Human Lung Cell Atlas is a huge resource for the scientific and medical community. Openly available to researchers, new disease data can be mapped onto the HLCA, transforming research into lung biology and disease. As the first whole reference atlas of a major organ, the HLCA also represents a milestone towards achieving a full Human Cell Atlas which will transform our understanding of biology and disease and lay the foundation for a new era of healthcare”.

ENDS

Contact Details:
Dr Samantha Wynne,
Human Cell Atlas Scientific Communications Manager,
HCA UK Office, Wellcome Sanger Institute,
Cambridge, CB10 1SA, UK
Email: press@humancellatlas.org
 

Notes to Editors:

*The Human Cell Atlas (HCA)
The Human Cell Atlas (HCA) is an international collaborative consortium which is creating comprehensive reference maps of all human cells—the fundamental units of life—as a basis for understanding human health and for diagnosing, monitoring, and treating disease. The HCA is likely to impact every aspect of biology and medicine, propelling translational discoveries and applications and ultimately leading to a new era of precision medicine.

The HCA was co-founded in 2016 by Dr Sarah Teichmann at the Wellcome Sanger Institute (UK) and Dr Aviv Regev, then at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard (USA). A truly global initiative, there are now more than 2,900 HCA members, from 94 countries around the world. https://www.humancellatlas.org

**The Human Cell Atlas Lung Biological Network is a group of scientists who collaborate to map the cell types and states present in human airways. This group is coordinated by Pascal Barbry, Alexander Misharin, Martijn Nawijn and Jay Rajagopal.

Publication:
An integrated cell atlas of the lung in health and disease. Lisa Sikkema et al. (2023). Nature MedicineDOI :10.1038/s41591-023-02327-2

Funding:
This work was supported by many funders including: The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, European Union H2020 (Discovair), Fondation pour la Recherche Médicale, National Infrastructure France Génomique, Wellcome, The Netherlands Lung Foundation, The German Center for Lung Research, the Helmholtz Association and the European Respiratory Society. Please see the paper for full list of funders.


Selected Websites:

Helmholtz Munich
Helmholtz Munich is a leading biomedical research center. Its mission is to develop breakthrough solutions for better health in a rapidly changing world. Interdisciplinary research teams focus on environmentally triggered diseases, especially the therapy and prevention of diabetes, obesity, allergies, and chronic lung diseases. With the power of artificial intelligence and bioengineering, researchers accelerate the translation to patients. Helmholtz Munich has more than 2,500 employees and is headquartered in Munich/Neuherberg. It is a member of the Helmholtz Association, with more than 43,000 employees and 18 research centers the largest scientific organization in Germany. More about Helmholtz Munich (Helmholtz Zentrum München Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Gesundheit und Umwelt GmbH): www.helmholtz-munich.de/en [helmholtz-munich.de] 

University Medical Center Groningen
The University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG) is one of the largest hospitals in the Netherlands and is the largest employer in the Northern Netherlands. More
characterized by a combination of fundamental and patient oriented clinical research. The interaction between these two stimulates the development of new clinical and research opportunities. Problems that occur in the clinical practice act as a catalyst which sets new fundamental research in motion, whereas fundamental research can come up with new clinical possibilities. The UMCG focuses on healthy ageing in all priority areas: research, clinical care and education. Together we push boundaries for a sustainable future of health. https://umcgresearch.org/