The Information · MIT Technology Review
This scientist is helping build a missing map of childhood
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In 2017, Deanne Taylor attended a presentation at the University of Pennsylvania, a short walk from her office.
Key facts
- In 2021 the NIH awarded a $38.5 million grant to the Developmental Genotype-Tissue Expression Project (dGTEx), a major initiative aimed at establishing the first comprehensive database of healthy
- In 2017, Deanne Taylor attended a presentation at the University of Pennsylvania, a short walk from her office
- The 2017 talk was the moment Taylor didn’t know she’d been waiting
- The dGTEx team will eventually feed its data into the Human Cell Atlas, which, thanks to Taylor and many of the coauthors of the 2019 paper, now includes a pediatric section
Summary
A researcher was there to unveil the Human Cell Atlas, an ambitious project that aimed to map every cell in the human body. Since joining the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) as the director of bioinformatics three years earlier, Taylor had been disappointed by the lack of investment in medical research focused on children. The 2017 talk was the moment Taylor didn’t know she’d been waiting for. She then rallied a cross-hospital coalition of pediatric researchers to contribute to the project and spearheaded a 2019 paper that outlined the case for studying children—a bid to attract more interest and funding to the field. So far, the push has paid off. In 2021 the NIH awarded a $38.5 million grant to the Developmental Genotype-Tissue Expression Project (dGTEx), a major initiative aimed at establishing the first comprehensive database of healthy pediatric tissue.