Nipple discharge, fat necrosis, intraductal papillomas, fibroadenomas, cysts, mastitis, tumors… There are many benign and malignant diseases that can affect the breasts at any age in a woman’s life. In order to better diagnose and treat these conditions, it is convenient to study and know breast biology well. For this purpose, it has been created the world’s largest and most comprehensive map of breast tissuea monumental project that has lasted seven years and that is published this Thursday Nature.
As a joke, it is not a simple world map of ‘tits’. It is a work that has used spatial genomics methods and single cell sequencing (single-cell) to describe more than 714,000 cells from 126 women, highlighting 12 main cell types and 58 cell states.
“We were able to take advantage of many technologies to define, in a very detailed and careful way, all the different cell types and cell states in each of the major areas of the breast. We hope this tool will be very useful for anyone studying breast cancer and other diseases such as mastitisas well as breast development or lactation failure,” says Nicholas Navin, head of the Department of Systems Biology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, whose researchers are leading the study with the University of California, Irvine. and the Baylor (Texas) School of Medicine.
“Until now there were approximations, that is, it was not such a large number and not in such a systematic way, but the technology to be able to genomically analyze a cell or a very specific cell subtype has been developed for a few years. It is an expensive technique, quite laborious and requires a very powerful computer analysis, but there is still a long way to go before it can be taken to the clinic,” says Alberto Orta, an oncologist at MD Anderson Cancer Center Madrid.
The Human Breast Cell Atlas is part of the global Human Cell Atlas consortium supported by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), which uses the latest technologies to ggenerate cell reference maps for each organ system of the human body.