Adam Taylor

👏 Huge thanks to everyone at @sagebio.bsky.social , @mskcancercenter.bsky.social , @isbscience.org , @danafarber.bsky.social and across the HTAN community who made this possible—especially Ino and Milen, who led the charge and brought it all together.

📚 The paper also covers:
• Data standards and governance
• Infrastructure choices
• Community engagement strategies
• Lessons for others coordinating complex biomedical data at scale

🔐 The portal points users to federated data destinations. Controlled-access data is available through the Cancer Research Data Commons (with dbGaP approval). Open-access datasets can be downloaded via Sage’s Synapse platform.

🔍 The HTAN Portal is the central hub for exploring and accessing HTAN data. It offers intuitive, facet-based search, visualizations of imaging datasets, and links to curated views of imaging, single cell and clinical data in Minerva, CellxGene and cBioPortal
humantumoratlas.org

🛠️ The DCC built infrastructure to ingest, harmonize, and share data—backed by the Synapse platform and made explorable through the MSK-built HTAN Portal. We’re already putting this system to use for HTAN Phase 2!
humantumoratlas.org

🧬 Data from the first phase of HTAN is now available:
• 8,425 biospecimens
• 2,042 research participants
• 20+ molecular assays
All generated to study transitions in space and time from precancerous states to advanced disease.

📣 Our perspective paper on building the Human Tumor Atlas Network Data Coordinating Center is out in Nature Methods!
Led by the excellent Ino de Bruijn and Milen Nikolov, it captures how we’ve made large-scale, multi-modal cancer data findable, explorable, & reusable.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

16TB collection of federal public datasets linked by data.gov, including over 311,000 datasets harvested during 2024 and 2025, are now part of a new data vault project seeking to preserve vital research data.

lil.law.harvard.edu/blog/2025/02...

#openscience #datapreservation

I’m doing a lot of yelling at NIH, but I want to specifically say that I fully support all the SRO/POs. This is not on them. They need to be there for the rebuilding effort (which will come) in the future. The community needs to fight on their behalf as well.

Spatial multi-omics has just gone to the next level!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
—Integration of 5 omic modalities w/ spatial resolution at 20 -50 μm
—"a new era for characterizing tissue & cellular heterogeneity that single-modality studies alone could not reveal"

Tufnell Park Farmers Marker haul. Not pictured the best corn empanadas ever. Devoured immediately.

Dark times at NIH, but today's first steering committee for Phase 2 of #HTAN reminds us what's at stake. Brilliant cell atlas teams forging ahead, mapping cancer in unprecedented detail. New working groups in viz, compute & translation and outreach will be beacons of light.

The grant is submitted. The old fashioned is made. The jazz is playing. The book is being read. Time to breathe.