Devon Lawson, PhD, and Kai Kessenbrock, PhD, participate in milestone Human Breast Cell Atlas Project

Devon Lawson, PhD, and Kai Kessenbrock, PhD, associate professors in the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine, are co-corresponding authors of the Human Breast Cell Atlas, recently published in Nature.

The milestone project is the largest-ever atlas of normal breast cells, providing an unprecedented new resource for investigators working to understand changes that occur in the tissue during cancer and other diseases of the breast.

“This spatially resolved, single-cell atlas will provide invaluable new details about the complexity of the organ and how it functions in diverse populations which will facilitate new breakthroughs in our knowledge of how breast cancer arises,” Lawson says. “I am confident that our work will impact the treatment of breast cancer patients in both the short- and long-term.”

The team-science effort was also led by senior corresponding author Nicholas Navin, PhD, chair of Systems Biology at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center; and Bora Lim, MD, and Alastair Thompson, MD, of Baylor College of Medicine. The project is part of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative-supported global Human Cell Atlas consortium which uses recent technologies to generate cellular reference maps for every organ system in the human body.

This work was supported by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the National Cancer Institute (RO1CA240526, RO1CA236864, 1R01CA234496, F30CA243419), the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) Single Cell Genomics Center (RP180684), the American Cancer Society, the Rosalie B. Hite Fund for Cancer Research Fellowship, and the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) Training Grant.