Plenary Talk / Keynote 1 (Sarah Teichmann, Ph.D.): "Mapping the Human Body One Cell at a Time"

Mapping the Human Body One Cell at a Time

The 37 trillion cells of the human body have a remarkable array of specialised functions and must cooperate in time and space to construct a functioning human. Combining single cell and spatial genomics with AI/ML tools and data science, my lab has been attempting to understand this cellular diversity, how it is generated during development and how it goes wrong in disease. My talk will present recent advances towards a virtual Human Cell Atlas (HCA). I will highlight methods we developed to integrate and annotate cell atlases, and discuss how these models can be used to disentangle the effect of covariates, predict unseen perturbations and decode the regulatory logic of human cell types. I will additionally describe GenAI-based approaches we developed to model the spatial organization of cell types within organs, which can be leveraged to predict the effect of a cell on its neighbours.