UTHealth Houston joins NIH BRAIN Initiative’s Cell Atlas Network with 5-year, nearly $5M grant

A five-year, nearly $5 million grant, which will help create a coordinating unit for biostatistics, informatics, and engagement (CUBIE) for a Cell Atlas Network program to advance knowledge about the interacting neurons of the human brain, has been awarded to researchers at UTHealth Houston by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Brain Research Through Advancing Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative. 

A group including UTHealth Houston, the Allen Institute, and the Broad Institute was among the four recipients of the CUBIE grant, marking UTHealth Houston’s entrance into the larger NIH BRAIN Initiative Cell Atlas Network (BICAN).

The project's principal investigator is GQ Zhang, PhD, vice president and chief data scientist for UTHealth Houston. Principal investigators co-leading the project with Zhang are Hua Xu, PhD, the Glassell Family Distinguished Professor and associate dean for innovation; and W. Jim Zheng, PhD, professor and director of the Data Science and Informatics Core for Cancer Research (DSICCR), both with UTHealth Houston School of Biomedical Informatics.

The BRAIN Initiative aims to accelerate the development and application of innovative technologies, enabling researchers to share data in order to produce a revolutionary, new dynamic picture of the human brain that, for the first time, will show how individual cells and complex neural circuits interact in both time and space.

“Overall, we will leverage health data science to maximize the value of the tremendous amount of information generated from the latest biological, imaging, and sequencing technologies for a better understanding of neurological functions and disorders,” Zhang said. “Working at an unprecedented collaborative scale, we will broadly share resources and technology to accelerate the understanding of human brain cell types and their organizational principles to construct an open-access digital brain cell reference atlas, setting the stage for translating such discoveries into new ways to treat, cure, and even prevent brain disorders.” Zhang is also a professor in the Department of Neurology with McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston, co-director of the Texas Institute for Restorative Neurotechnologies, and holder of a joint appointment in the School of Biomedical Informatics and School of Public Health.

Additionally, the CUBIE grant will inspire neurological research by making data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable through community-wide efforts.

The CUBIE will be composed of four elements: 1) a common sequencing data processing pipeline; 2) a shared imaging data processing pipeline; 3) a comprehensive brain cell knowledge base; and 4) an engagement and outreach element to coordinate research within and beyond the BRAIN Initiative’s Cell Atlas Network (BICAN).

“This award is a recognition of UTHealth Houston’s strength in health data science and innovation as a whole,” Zhang said. “Through this national collaborative with other CUBIE and BICAN awardee institutions, UTHealth Houston will stay at the forefront of neuroscience research and make new contributions to the NIH BRAIN Initiative.”

Additional investigators include Rashmi Abeysinghe, PhD; Licong Cui, PhD; Yan Huang, PhD; Xiaojin Li, PhD; Cui Tao, PhD; and Shiqiang Tao, PhD, all faculty members with the School of Biomedical Informatics and/or McGovern Medical School’s Department of Neurology.

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