On Oct. 27, 2019, the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust announced it had awarded $13 million in grant funding to support the creation of a catalog of the various cell types that make up the large and small intestines.

The Gut Cell Atlas represent one part of the Human Cell Atlas, an international effort launched in 2016 to build a reference atlas of all human cell types using single-cell genomics and other technologies to produce 3D maps of how different cells function together in healthy and disease states.