A leading team of international brain researchers aims to map the approximately 200 billion cells in the human brain according to their type and function. A project worth about $110 million. The Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) is developing techniques for data visualization to make the enormous amount of complex data that results more insightful. This atlas is expected to accelerate research into the causes and treatments of brain diseases.
Professor of Biomedical Imaging Boudewijn Lelieveldt calls the BRAIN Initiative® Cell Atlas Network (BICAN) program a huge project. “The National Institutes of Health in the United States has made $500 million available to gain more insight into the different types of cells in our brain,” says Lelieveldt. BICAN is also considered the brain variant of the Human Genome Project, an exceptional scientific effort that aimed to map the entire human genome. The LUMC is involved in a recently awarded USD 110 million subproject that aims to map the cell types and their function in the brain using the most modern so-called spatial omics techniques.
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Lelieveldt and colleagues are computer scientists and they say they are involved in a small part of this project. But that doesn’t make their role unimportant. “You can imagine that this project yields a huge amount of data, it will be our task to make this box of data more transparent,” says Lelieveldt. “We try to distill a clear compact message from all the data, as if you had to reduce the thickest book in the world to a thin photo book with the essence.” They use the Cytosplore Viewer software that they have developed themselves within the Medical Delta and in close collaboration with Dr Thomas Höllt of TU Delft. The LUMC and TU Delft have been working together in this field for some time, including within the scientific program Medical Delta AI for Computational Life Sciences.
Although the entire project is led by the Allen Institute for Brain Science in the United States, the BICAN program is a true team effort. Research groups from many leading American universities, such as Harvard, as well as European and Asian universities are involved. The most detailed atlas of the human brain to date is expected to be completed in five years’ time.
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And then? “Then many pieces of the puzzle will fall into place,” says Lelieveldt. “It will give researchers around the world more insight into how our brains work exactly and what underlies various brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s. It will accelerate the development of treatments.” Lelieveldt considers it an honor to be part of this project. “I really have to pinch myself sometimes. These are extremely expensive and complex experiments that are not financially viable for individual universities, so the possibilities and scale of the project seem almost endless. And it is, for us computer scientists, a truly monumental dataset to work with.”
Read more about the project on the Allen Institute website.