Opportunity to Encourage More Representative Research

To cure, prevent, or manage all diseases, scientific research should include people of all ancestries. To help advance that vision, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) has launched a new funding opportunity aimed at expanding the ancestral diversity of the samples in the Human Cell Atlas (HCA), an international effort to map all cells in the human body as a foundational resource for understanding health and disease.

Diseases manifest differently in different people, and ancestry is one factor that impacts disease severity, outcome, and treatment. Individuals of European ancestry account for 80 percent of genomics data, and studies based on a narrow slice of ancestral background are often not generalizable to all people. To help fill these gaps in scientific knowledge, the Ancestry Networks for the Human Cell Atlas Request for Applications (RFA) will support teams of researchers to generate healthy, single-cell reference data from historically understudied populations.

The Ancestry Networks RFA builds off of CZI’s experience supporting the work of ten collaborative research teams that studied tissue samples from a diversity of populations, including people who are Black, Latinx, Asian, and Indigenous, as an initial step in addressing equal representation in the HCA. The new RFA will support collaborative networks of researchers for three-year projects. Teams should consist of at least three and up to ten principal investigators, including at least one computational biologist or data scientist and one expert in single-cell biology. Community-based participatory researchers should be involved in the collaboration to ensure that the research is attuned to the needs of and connected with the participating donor communities.

Ancestry Networks will collectively generate new tools, open source analysis methods, and openly available data from underrepresented donors across multiple tissue types and will provide valuable contributions to the HCA community. Example projects could include the generation of data from organs and tissues from a single or multiple ancestral groups; the development and sharing of tissue resources that will support standards, protocols, and tissue access to researchers; and the expansion of community engagement or donor recruitment programs and models.

Ancestry Networks will accept applications under the RFA through May 25 at 5:00 p.m. PT.

For more information and application instructions, visit CZI's online grants management portal.