New Paper on the Goals and Visions of HCA│Organoid Now Published in Nature Biotechnology

Within the global context provided by the Human Cell Atlas (HCA), the new European research project HCA|Organoid aims to kickstart the development of a comprehensive “Organoid Cell Atlas”. This initiative will firmly establish single-cell analysis of human organoids within the HCA and thereby advance biomedical research. This vision and the anticipated impact of the Organoid Cell Atlas are described in a strategy paper that has now been published in Nature Biotechnology (DOI: 10.1038/s41587-020-00762-x). The collaborative paper furthermore details the project's experimental design and research scope and addresses key challenges of the project.

The multi-disciplinary researchers involved in the project are fostering synergies between single-cell profiling and organoid technology to better characterize organoids as faithful models of human biology. The single-cell data will be used as a “Rosetta stone”, meant to cross-reference the results obtained from tissue samples of patients with analyzes of the experimentally more flexible organoids grown in vitro. Researchers seek to use this method to discover a new disease-associated cell type in primary samples, generate equivalent cells in human organoids, and examine potential therapeutic strategies in vitro. Lastly, the project members hope to build an international, interdisciplinary, and collaborative network for future organoid research.