Helping to ensure safer pregnancies with the Human Cell Atlas project

The Human Cell Atlas (HCA) is a global research project aimed at understanding how the placenta survives and functions, which is of critical importance in ensuring pregnancies are healthy and viable.

'The fetus creates the placenta which surrounds and protects it, and establishes communication between itself and its mother's uterus in which it is developing, said cellular geneticist Dr Roser Vento-Tormo, from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Cambridge.

Discoveries made by discoveries made by HCA researchers can be read about in this Guardian article.

Furthermore, a study detailing the first integrated human lung cell atlas, another part of the HCA research project is detailed in BioNews 1193.