On Oct. 25, 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 initiative aims to understand distinct cell functions and interactions in human health and Crohn’s disease. Helmsley’s Gut Cell Atlas initiative is part of the larger Human Cell Atlas, an international effort to map all cells in the human body.

Human bodies are composed of trillions of cells. Each one matters, yet there is no complete catalog of all the cell types in the human body and little is known about how cells function and work together in tissues such as the gut. Advances in technology – namely analyses of gene expression at single-cell resolution and in spatial contexts – offer a new frontier for understanding both health and disease at the cellular level.

Indeed, Helmsley’s support will enable researchers to build a Gut Cell Atlas to examine both healthy and diseased intestinal tissue, paving the way to identifying key cell types involved in Crohn’s disease and learning what drives their behavior. This will complement $10 million in prior Helmsley commitments supporting Crohn’s disease research using single-cell analysis.