More than 9,000 datasets from over 500 healthy donors now sit behind one free online door: the HuBMAP Data Portal, a resource built to help researchers see what human health looks like at the level of cells and tissues.
That healthy picture matters because scientists need a baseline to understand what changes in disease. Biomedical atlases already gather information about people with different illnesses, but without a comparable view of healthy organs, it is harder to tell which patterns are unusual. “To understand disease, you first need to know what healthy looks like,” said Morgan Turner, the portal project’s first author and director of scientific operations at Harvard Medical School’s HIDIVE Lab.
The portal is the online home of the Human BioMolecular Atlas Program, or HuBMAP. More than 600 people at over 60 institutions took part in the program, an eight-year effort to map cells, tissues and organ systems across the healthy human body. Its collection covers dozens of organs and tissues and brings together more than 25 kinds of molecular and imaging data. The researchers say no other single resource currently matches its combination of scope and scale.
Researchers can use web-based tools to browse data by organ system, search for patterns in gene activity and molecular signatures across tissues, and explore information about individual cells. They can first check whether the atlas may help answer a question without downloading huge files or using powerful computers. For deeper work, data can be downloaded, and the portal offers open metadata and programming interfaces—ways for software to access and work with information.
Making results gathered by many labs comparable took more than putting files in one place. HuBMAP samples were captured using different tools and technologies. The team worked with consortium members to create shared data and metadata standards, then built consistent processing steps so that information from different sources could be compared in a scientifically sound way. The standards also support the portal’s visual tools and make the data suitable for artificial intelligence research.
The portal was built by teams led by researchers at Harvard Medical School, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University. Senior author Nils Gehlenborg, a professor of biomedical informatics at Harvard Medical School, said the portal lets users explore relationships among the trillions of cells in a healthy body in ways that were not previously possible. General data are freely available, while access to protected information, such as sequencing data that could identify donors, requires approval.
By making a shared healthy reference easier to explore, HuBMAP gives researchers a stronger starting point for asking how illness changes cells and tissues. The resource is designed for people as well as AI tools, and its open standards make it easier to compare findings across organs, donors and laboratories. As scientists use the atlas alongside disease-focused resources, they can build a fuller picture of how the body works—and where that picture begins to change.