Joseph Wu, Leah Backhus, and other Stanford and UCSF faculty to receive grant from Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
By Roxanna Van Norman
November 19, 2021
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) recently announced grant recipients of the Ancestry Networks for the Human Cell Atlas, a collection of projects to help solve some of society’s toughest challenges in human cells and diseases.
Among the projects is the Human Heart Atlas of Diverse Ancestry, led by a team of investigators from Stanford University and University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Joseph Wu, MD, PhD, Director of the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute and the Simon H. Stertzer, MD, Professor of Medicine and Radiology, and Leah Backhus, MD, MPH, FACS, Associate Professor of Cardiothoracic Surgery (Thoracic Surgery) at the Stanford School of Medicine, are two of the co-principal investigators on the project.
“We are thrilled to receive the grant from Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which will help us further understand the development of heart diseases influenced by genetics and environmental factors,” said Dr. Backhus.
The Ancestry Networks for the Human Cell Atlas projects support researchers to contribute healthy, single-cell reference data from ancestrally diverse tissue samples to the Human Cell Atlas, with the aim of creating a more globally representative resource to understand disease.
In this project, the team will construct a single-cell transcriptomic and epigenetic atlas of hearts from donors of diverse and historically underrepresented ancestries. Specifically, this team will construct single-cell multi-omics and spatial transcriptomics profiles of 60 healthy hearts originating from people of diverse ancestral backgrounds, including African American, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, and Pacific Islanders. The project will profile the transcriptome and epigenome of more than 60,000 heart cells for single-cell transcriptomics and epigenetics and 600 spatially resolved transcriptomes of adult hearts from diverse ancestries.
Other Stanford investigators include Wing Wong, PhD, professor of statistics and biomedical data science; William Greenleaf, PhD, associate professor of genetics; James Zou, PhD, assistant professor of biomedical data science, and Fatima Rodriguez, MD, MPH, assistant professor of medicine. Andrew Connolly, MD, PhD, is also an investigator on the project from UCSF.
CZI will launch the grant program by bringing together the Ancestry Networks grantees virtually on March 9 and 10, 2022.
For more information about the project, visit the Human Heart Atlas of Diverse Ancestry.
Dr. Joseph Wu
Co-Principal Investigator
Dr. Leah Backhus
Co-Principal Investigator