In this webinar, we heard from the 2020 GlaxoSmithKline Award winner, Dr Sarah Teichmann. In her Award Lecture, Dr Teichmann discusses the Human Cell Atlas (HCA), an ambitious global initiative aiming to create a comprehensive reference map of all human cells.

The GlaxoSmithKline Award is made in recognition of research leading to new advances in medical science. Dr Teichmann is Head of Cellular Genetics at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and her work focuses on deciphering the immune system with genomics and bioinformatics approaches. The Human Cell Atlas (HCA) is an ambitious global initiative aiming to create a comprehensive reference map of all human cells—the fundamental units of life—as a basis for both understanding human health and diagnosing, monitoring, and treating disease. Co-founded by Dr Teichmann and Dr Aviv Regev from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in the US, the HCA was launched in London in 2016. The HCA’s ground-breaking approach is providing unprecedented understanding of human cells and tissue architecture in health and diseases including COVID-19 infection, cancer, respiratory and auto-immune disease. 

This webinar was chaired by Professor Colin Bingle, Professor of Respiratory Cell and Molecular Biology at the University of Sheffield, and Chair of the Biochemical Society’s Awards Committee.