On Oct. 13, 2016, the Cell Atlas Initiative was launched at a meeting at The Wellcome Trust in London. Experts from around the world – convened by Wellcome, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard – met to discuss how to shape the Human Cell Atlas.a collaborative community of world-leading scientists met in London and discussed how to build a Human Cell Atlas – a collection of maps that will describe and define the cellular basis of health and disease.

The project intend was intended to catalog all of the estimated 37 trillion cells that make up a human body.