On May 7, 2020, the Wellcome Sanger Institute announced that Roser Vento-Tormo, a Group Leader was one of the recipients of funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) to study how COVID-19 progresses in patients, at the level of individual cells and tissues. CZI suppored five projects studying COVID-19 progression with a total of $750,000 funding.

Joint project leader with Esteban Ballestar from the Josep Carreras Institute, Roser and her collaborators will study positive samples from up to 50 COVID-19 patients using single-cell RNA sequencing methods, to create a cell atlas of these immune cells. Patients will include people with autoimmune diseases, such as systemic lupus erythematosus, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, and multiple sclerosis, as well as immunodeficient patients, to help understand the immune response and progression of SARS-CoV-2 infection.

CZI is supporting five projects studying COVID-19 progression, with a total of $750,000 funding. These projects will create single-cell datasets from donors infected by SARS-CoV-2 and provide critical insights into how the virus infects humans, which cell types are involved, and how the disease progresses.

The five new projects will use similar approaches to the COVID-19 Cell Atlas work with the Sanger Institute and Human Cell Atlas consortium that recently revealed key nose cells were likely entry points for the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. This research was also partly funded by CZI. The new projects will profile cells in infected tissues and the immune system in COVID-19 patients.

In addition to the work led by Roser Vento-Tormo and Esteban Ballestar, the new grants will support projects led by investigators at Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT’s Ragon Institute, the Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard, Columbia University and VIB-UGent, with funding allocated equally among the five projects. All data generated by these grants will quickly be made available to the scientific community via open access datasets and portals.