The novel insight is akin to moving from the maps of the 15th Century era of Joan of Arc and Richard III to what the phone in your pocket can load.
The old maps of the body had the equivalent of major roads and significant geography but also areas cartographers labelled unknown or “terra incognita”.
“[Now] it looks more like a Google map, you have a high resolution view and then on top of that you have the Street View that explains what’s going on, and then on top of that you can see the dynamic changes during the day when less cars are flowing or more cars are flowing,” said Dr Aviv Regev, one of the founders who now works at now at Genentech.
She added: “This is essential for us to understand and treat disease, cells are the basic unit of life, if things go wrong, they go wrong with our cells.”
Performing a feat of “human cartography” requires cutting-edge biology and computer science.
The project so far has looked at more than 100 million cells – deeply analysing each individual one - from 10,000 people around the world.
The journal Nature has now published, external a series of 40 scientific discoveries as researchers work towards creating the first draft of the whole human cell atlas.
“This is a major milestone that marks a great leap in understanding of the human body,” said Dr Sarah Teichmann, from the University of Cambridge and one of the founders of the Human Cell Atlas.
Another discovery showed how the human skeleton forms in the womb in the weeks after conception.
First a scaffold of cartilage, like the wobbly bit on the end of your nose, forms. Then bone cells grow over it. This happens everywhere except for the very top of the skull to give the brain space to grow.
Some of the genetic instructions involved in orchestrating this early developmental process are the same ones implicated in osteoarthritis decades later.
“Ultimately, using this atlas could help us better understand the conditions of both the young and ageing skeleton,” said Dr Ken To, from the Wellcome Sanger Institute.
A similar study looked at the thymus – a small organ involved in training the immune system. Researchers showed this process started much earlier than previously thought suggesting the earliest stages of pregnancy could have an impact on immune function for life.
It also gives ideas for engineering new immune-cell-based therapies in the laboratory for fighting diseases such as a cancer.
Another example of the Human Cell Atlas in action came during the Covid pandemic when the detailed maps of the body allowed scientists to anticipate how the virus would move from tissue to tissue, external and identified the nose, mouth and eyes as key entry points to the body.
Dr Katrina Gold, from the Wellcome Trust medical research funder, said today’s announcements were a “true milestone for the Human Cell Atlas”.
“When complete, it could transform the ways we diagnose, monitor and treat diseases,” she said.