Two University of Chicago research teams have received funding from The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust to contribute to building a Gut Cell Atlas, a collaborative effort that aims to define every type of cell in the human ileum (the last part of the small intestine) and colon.
The projects are part of the Human Cell Atlas, an international effort by experts in biology, computation and medicine to map all the cells in the human body. The resulting cellular and molecular map will help researchers better understand what goes wrong when disease strikes.
One grant awards $2.9 million over three years to geneticists Oni Basu, PhD, and Sebastian Pott, PhD; computational scientist Matthew Stephens, PhD; and renowned inflammatory bowel disease researcher Eugene B. Chang, MD, to catalog the human gut cells of healthy patients and those with Crohn’s disease.