Deanne Taylor pushes for a pediatric map of human cells

Deanne Taylor, director of bioinformatics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, has helped turn a missing pediatric focus in the Human Cell Atlas into a coordinated research effort. After learning in 2017 that the atlas initially planned to study adults, she joined its volunteer team, contributed to planning documents, and helped organize pediatric researchers around a 2019 paper making the case for studying children.

The work has fed into the Developmental Genotype-Tissue Expression Project, or dGTEx, which aims to create the first comprehensive database of healthy pediatric tissue. The project collects samples from otherwise healthy children who have died and whose parents agreed to donate their bodies, then maps gene expression across major organ systems. Taylor’s team curates and standardizes related data, including family history and sample details, before the information is combined into a baseline for healthy childhood development.

The effort could help explain why children can respond differently to drugs and disease than adults. Gene expression affects how the body’s roughly 20,000 genes function in tissue cells, and pediatric differences can influence whether treatments help or cause harm. A pediatric cell atlas could give researchers age-matched reference points for diagnostics, drug targets, and earlier intervention in diseases that may begin taking shape during childhood.