A population-scale immune multiome atlas has been unveiled, detailing regulatory disease mechanisms through extensive contributions from institutions including the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Massachusetts General Hospital, and international research partners.
A massive collaborative effort involving dozens of academic and corporate institutions has culminated in the publication of a population-scale immune multiome atlas.
Broad Institutional Collaboration Across Research Centers
The research unites scientists from the Program in Medical and Population Genetics and the Klarman Cell Observatory at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, alongside investigators from the Center for Computational and Integrative Biology and the Department of Molecular Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Additional contributions came from the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM) at the University of Helsinki, the Finnish Red Cross Blood Service Biobank and Research and Development divisions in Vantaa and Helsinki, and the Analytic and Translational Genetics Unit and Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research.
Further institutional backing spans the University of Tokyo’s Department of Genome Informatics, Graduate School of Medicine, and Institute of Medical Science; the RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences in Yokohama; Keio University School of Medicine in Tokyo; and the Osaka University Immunology Frontier Research Center (WPI-IFReC) and Premium Research Institute for Human Metaverse Medicine (WPI-PRIMe). Other participating bodies include Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Juntendo University Faculty of Medicine, Nippon Medical School, and the Gene Lay Institute of Immunology and Inflammation.
Industry Partners and Global Scientific Contributors
The initiative also integrated substantial industry collaboration, featuring researchers and scientists from major pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. Teams from AbbVie based in Chicago, Illinois; AstraZeneca in Cambridge, United Kingdom; Bayer in Leverkusen, Germany; Biogen in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Boehringer Ingelheim in Ingelheim am Rhein, Germany, participated in the multi-institutional publication.
Individual researchers driving the work include Masahiro Kanai, Juha Karjalainen, Georgia Panagiotaropoulou, Yuanxiang Zhang, Zhili Zheng, Mark J. Daly, Mary Pat Reeve, Mitja Kurki, Wei Zhou, and Aarno Palotie. Additional key contributors listed in the Nature publication comprise Kosaku Nanki, Toshimi Yoshida, Kai Liu, Daniel B. Graham, Ramnik J. Xavier, Toni M. Finan, Daniel Chafamo, Yixiao Zhu, Caroline B. M. Porter, Orr Ashenberg, Jarno Honkanen, Julianna Juvila, Jussi Halonen, Kimmo Pitkänen, Jukka Partanen, Mikko Arvas, Yoshihiko Tomofuji, Daiki Tokuyasu, Shinichi Namba, Kyuto Sonehara, Yukinori Okada, Norihiro Harada, Sonoko Harada, Yasunobu Nagata, Satoshi Wakita, Hiroki Yamaguchi, Koichi Matsuda, Takayuki Morisaki, Natsuhiko Kumasaka, Akiko Nagai, Rodosthenis S. Rodosthenous, Sanni Ruotsalainen, Shane Murphy, Isabella Teixeira-Soldano, Hee Seung Hwang, Cristin McCabe, Eric Chen, Marla Glean, and Nitya Mehrotra.
Corporate Investigators and R&D Teams
The corporate contingent brought specialized teams to the atlas project. Among those participating from AbbVie were Tushar Kumar, Andrew Blumenfeld, Britney Milkovich, Jan Freudenberg, Anneke Den Hollander, Mengzhen Liu, Relja Popovic, Apinya Lertratanakul, Anne Lehtonen, Nizar Smaoui, Adam Ziemann, Fedik Rahimov, Jeffrey Waring, Howard Jacob, and Bridget Riley-Gillis. Margarete Fabre, Oliver Burren, Thomas Spargo, Andrew Lowe, Santosh Atanur, Kousik Kundu, Eleanor Wheeler, Bram Prins, Dirk Paul, Ioanna Tachmazidou, Slavé Petrovski, and Coralie Viollet formed part of the group of AstraZeneca investigators.
Tobias Hogrebe, Thomas Battram, Juho Immonen, Johanna Mielke, Samu Kurki, Nicole Schmidt, Martin Rao, Karl Heilbron, Himanshu Manchanda, Hans van Leeuwen, Fabio Baschiera, Santha Ramakrishnan, and Alix Berton made up the Bayer participants. Biogen was represented by Ellen Tsai, Susan Eaton, Ketian Yu, Stephanie Loomis, and Coro Paisan-Ruiz, while Boehringer Ingelheim contributed Zhihao Ding, Marc Jung, Hanati Tuoken, Elke Markert, Frank Li, Yao Hu, Christoph Ogris, Eric Simon, Julio Cesar Bolivar Lopez, and Monika Frys.
