Academia & Research
November 5, 2026
HuBMAP Data Portal, Announced in Paper in Nature Communications, Links Over 9,000 Data Sets for Investigations of Human Body in 3D, and Scales from Organs to Cells
Nov. 5, 2026 — A team of scientists has announced the latest version of the HuBMAP Data Portal, a data repository and 3D map for studying the biological and chemical functions of the human body. In a paper in the Nov. 2, 2026, issue of the prestigious journal Nature Communications, the collaborators describe a set of online research and instructional tools, as well as 9,316 public data sets that investigators across the world will be able to use to search and study human health and ailments at scales as small as individual cells.
A product of the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s Human BioMolecular Atlas Program (HuBMAP), the new report was led by scientists at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and also involved HuBMAP-affiliated authors from the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), the University of Pittsburgh, Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Stanford University as well as elsewhere.
“The HuBMAP program has generated an enormously rich resource for deepening our understanding of human health and disease,” said senior author Nils Gehlenborg, associate professor of biomedical informatics in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School, principal investigator of the Humans in Data Integration, Visualization, and Exploration (HIDIVE) Lab at HMS, and one of the leaders of the portal project. “The portal gives users access to the data and also provides tools they can use to explore and analyze the complex relationships between the trillions of cells that make up each healthy human body in a way that’s never been possible before.”
The 9,316 datasets of the HuBMAP Data Portal span 26 types of data about 29 organ classes across 501 human donors, encompassing microscope images; DNA, RNA, protein, and other biochemical tests; and “metadata” that describe how the data were obtained and other relevant indirect details. A vital aspect to amassing these data was the many collaborators’ comprehensive effort to ensure uniform data processing and rigorous quality control that ensure “apples to apples” comparisons between results obtained from different methods, laboratories, organs, and donors.
The portal is designed to help scientists search the data to visualize, analyze, and make discoveries about how tissues, organs, and organ systems work in the human body in health and in disease. Importantly, scientists will be able to access the data at no charge, using only their Web browsers. The project’s ultimate goal is to enable investigators to shed light on how aging and diseases of all types affect the body’s functions, and how those functions can be corrected by medical interventions.
“To understand disease, you first need to know what healthy looks like,” said first author Morgan Turner, director of scientific operations in the HIDIVE Lab. “The portal brings together more than 25 types of molecular and imaging data from dozens of healthy human organs and tissues. Because the data follow community-driven, FAIR data and metadata standards, they can be compared across labs, organs, and donors. Those standards are also what power the portal’s visualization and analysis tools and make the data ready for AI.”
Future goals for the HuBMAP Data Portal include further development to make it and its tools more accurate and useful to scientists. HuBMAP and its collaborators will expand and update its reference data, the types of biochemical tests included, and list of organs mapped out. They will also improve and expand the number of web-based tools to improve access for scientists.
“Leveraging resources available at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, we will continue to make HuBMAP data and resources available to the community for at least the next 10 years,” said Philip Blood, PSC’s Scientific Director and a coauthor in the Nature Communications paper.
Those interested in contributing data; providing input on Data Portal use cases, data, code, user interfaces, or training materials; or learning more about the HuBMAP effort are encouraged to email [email protected].
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