NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) — The New York Genome Center and collaborators at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have received a $1.5 million grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) to develop a toolkit for integrated multimodal single cell profiling, NYGC said last week.
According to the center, the three-year grant funding will be used to develop new methods and tools for single-cell analysis that build on existing technologies, such as RNA sequencing and mass cytometry, and use novel computational approaches with the goal of improving characterization of human immune cells.
"Our aim is to both develop new methods for measuring important molecules in cells and exploit the advantages of existing methods," NYGC Technology Innovation Lab Manager Peter Smibert, who is leading the project, said in a statement. "By integrating the output of different technologies, we can cost-effectively interrogate cells in their appropriate tissue context."
The grant is part of a CZI effort to fund a series of research projects supporting the Human Cell Atlas, which was launched in 2016 to create a reference atlas of all human cell types. The project is using single-cell genomics approaches to produce 3D maps of how different cells function together, and how changes in these networks can lead to disease.