The Wellcome Sanger Institute is delighted to announce that it will be welcoming two new members of Faculty in September and October 2018: Hilary Martin and Emma Davenport. Both researchers have strong experience in studying the contributions of genetic variation to disease, or deciding whether or not a drug will be effective. Their work will help to lay the foundations of understanding needed for precision medicine – where the most effective treatments for individuals can be determined by reading the sequence of their genomes.

Martin Hemberg and Kerstin Meyer are recipients of three of the latest grants from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative DAF, an advised fund of Silicon Valley Community Foundation. These projects will help to build tools and technologies to support the Human Cell Atlas, a global effort to map every type of cell in the healthy human body.

Data sets of human and mouse cells have been made openly accessible on a preview site for the Human Cell Atlas initiative. The data sets are a valuable resource for the broader scientific community as they can can reveal basic biology, provide a reference for studying disease, and allow computational biologists to test new analysis tools.

The earliest critical genetic changes that can lead to kidney cancer have been mapped by scientists. The first key genetic change occurs in childhood or adolescence, and the resulting cells follow a consistent path to progress into kidney cancer four or five decades later, scientists have found.

New research on bowel cancer has shown that every tumour is different, and that every cell within the tumour is genetically unique. In the first study of its kind, researchers used the latest single cell and organoid technologies to understand the mutational processes of the disease. This study could help researchers target cancer-specific processes for prevention or treatment.

A long-standing mystery of how the high-priority malaria vaccine target TRAP interacts with human host cells has been solved. Wellcome Sanger Institute scientists have discovered a receptor protein on the surface of human cells that the malarial TRAP protein interacts with as it navigates through the body. This could help improve the development of an effective malaria vaccine.

UK Biobank announces today (6 April) a major initiative to sequence the full genomes of 50,000 UK Biobank volunteer participants. Funded by a £30M grant from the Medical Research Council (MRC), sequencing of the whole genome will be undertaken during 2018 and 2019 by the Wellcome Sanger Institute. With the ultimate goal to sequence all 500,000 UK Biobank participants, the investment will help establish the world’s most detailed whole genome database – and further accelerate research into a wide range of diseases that cause disability and premature death in mid to later life.

New single-cell technology has allowed scientists to study malaria parasites at the highest resolution to date. By investigating the genes in individual malaria parasites, scientists are beginning to understand the genetic processes each parasite undergoes as it moves through its complicated lifecycle. The results are the first step towards developing the Malaria Cell Atlas, a data resource will allow researchers to identify weak points in the parasite’s lifecycle for intervention with drugs.

Wellcome Genome Campus Advanced Courses and Scientific Conferences (ACSC) today (Tuesday 27 March) announces the launch of its first online course, in partnership with FutureLearn, the leading social learning platform. The free online course introduces the genomics of disease-causing bacteria, such as MRSA, E. coli and Chlamydia which infect millions of people every year, and is open to anyone for enrolment now, with the course starting on April 30th 2018.

A principal contribution of the Wellcome Genome Campus will be to offer coordination and support for three Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) test beds called ‘Embedded Nuclei’. Dr Ken Skeldon, Head of Wellcome Genome Campus Public Engagement, based within Connecting Science, will lead the mentorship of these three research institutions, two of which are in Germany with the other in China.