Chinese scientists on Tuesday launched a "human cell lineage" mega-facility project in Guangzhou City of south China's Guangdong Province, which is designed to crack the code of human development, disease and the aging process.
As one of the national major science and technology infrastructure projects for the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025), the Human Cell Lineage Atlas Facility project is led by the Guangzhou Institute of Biomedicine and Health and the CAS and aims to map the spatiotemporal evolution of cells throughout the human lifespan, develop a large-scale AI model for digital cells and create a digital physiological human.
The cell is the fundamental unit of life, and the human body is composed of approximately 40 trillion cells. These cells originate from a single fertilized egg, undergoing dynamic processes, including proliferation, differentiation and aging, throughout their entire life cycle. This complete trajectory of cellular evolution is referred to as "cell lineage."
"To digitize a human body, we have to examine all the cells, digitize each one, and characterize them to systematically tackle the scientific challenge of digitizing life," said Sun Fei, director of the facility.
The facility integrates cutting-edge technologies to create a large digital cell AI model, which can be likened to compiling a comprehensive cellular family tree of life, enabling scientists and the public to clearly trace each cell's journey from origin to present state.
"The primary focus of the cell lineage project is to collect the transformations of cells throughout the processes of birth, aging, illness and death. We can think of cells as atoms in the material world. If we understand the changes in atoms, we will know how the material world works. In the same vein, if we understand the changes in cells, we will know how life works," said Chen Jiekai, deputy director of the facility.
The high-quality and large-scale cell lineage data collected by the facility can help create digital physiological humans, which will function like a breathing, drug-testing, metabolizing digital twin of the patient.
Current global innovative drug development faces three critical challenges: prolonged timelines, exorbitant costs and dismal clinical success rates.
On average, creating a new drug takes around 10 years and costs approximately 2.6 billion U.S. dollars, yet the clinical success rate remains below 10 percent.
A fundamental limitation lies in the predominant use of animal models, which fail to accurately replicate human physiological responses.
The facility will gather extensive cell lineage data and utilize AI to build a high-precision digital physiological human model at the single-cell level.
The technology could enhance the effectiveness of treatments before the patient undergoes them, allowing scientists to simulate the therapeutic outcomes of various treatments on these digital patients, thereby enhancing the precision of diagnosis and treatment.
"We can make the digital physiological human sick, a concept we refer to as digital disease, and we can administer digital medicine to the model. Therefore, our discovery of new drug targets and analysis of pharmacology can all be conducted within this digital environment, which will accelerate the process of biomedical development," said Sun.
Chinese scientists launch cellular research project to decode secrets of life, disease, aging
Chinese scientists launch cellular research project to decode secrets of life, disease, aging
Chinese scientists launch cellular research project to decode secrets of life, disease, aging
