This scientist is helping build a missing map of childhood

In 2017, Deanne Taylor attended a presentation at the University of Pennsylvania, just a short walk from her office. A researcher was there to unveil the Human Cell Atlas, an ambitious project that aimed to map every cell in the human body. Taylor was floored, and then concerned. As details emerged, she discovered that the project’s researchers had only made plans to study adults. “That’s when my little alarm went off,” she says. “ Not again. ”

Since joining the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) as the director of bioinformatics three years earlier, Taylor had been disappointed by the lack of investment in medical research focused on children. The dominant view, she says, was that children are exactly like small adults. They’re not. Children’s cells are different from grownups’ cells in the way they express genes—switching them on and off or turning them up or down. Those variations can cause drastically different and even deadly responses to drugs that adults tolerate well.

The 2017 talk was the moment Taylor didn’t know she’d been waiting for. She quickly channeled her concern into a campaign, joining the Human Cell Atlas’s volunteer team and helping write a section on children for a white paper outlining the group’s goals and plans. She then rallied a cross-hospital coalition of pediatric researchers to contribute to the project and spearheaded a 2019 paper that outlined the case for studying children—a bid to attract more interest and funding to the field. “It put a flag in the ground,” she says. “Why don’t we have healthy models of children’s development?”

So far, the push has paid off. In 2021 the NIH awarded a $38.5 million grant to the Developmental Genotype-Tissue Expression Project (dGTEx), a major initiative aimed at establishing the first comprehensive database of healthy pediatric tissue. The project banks samples collected from otherwise healthy children who have died and whose parents agreed to donate their bodies, and maps how genes across all the major organ systems are expressed. Taylor and her team curate and standardize the information associated with each tissue donation, including family history and details about the samples. A separate group does analysis on the samples themselves, and then all the information is combined to create a database­—a baseline of what gene expression looks like in children. It’s the first step to enabling research that could advance our knowledge of normal development, disease, drug effectiveness, and other phenomena.

The dGTEx team will eventually feed its data into the Human Cell Atlas, which, thanks to Taylor and many of the coauthors of the 2019 paper, now includes a pediatric section.

Taylor’s primary responsibility may be collecting and organizing data for dGTEx, but colleagues say she’s also the glue holding diverse research projects together. That’s especially important for the Human Cell Atlas, which depends on contributions from a loose coalition of researchers, all pursuing their own objectives. “Deanne took a big-picture view and said, We don’t just need to understand the pediatric kidney or the pediatric brain or the pediatric immune system. We need a holistic view of pediatric development ,” says Sarah Teichmann, a cofounder of the Human Cell Atlas. “She embodies that interdisciplinary spirit.”