More information on this project can be found on the Human Cell Atlas website
For the last two years Regev, a professor of biology at MIT, has been co-leading a massive international effort to get that answer. Called the Human Cell Atlas Consortium, the effort aims to account for and better understand every cell type and sub-type, and how they interact.
The Human Cell Atlas has received less attention than the $3 billion Human Genome Project, which was completed in 2003 after 15 years of work. But it's equally ambitious.
Regev and Teichmann, head of cellular genetics at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in the United Kingdom, formed the Human Cell Atlas Consortium in late 2016. The consortium includes 500 scientists from around the world; projects related to the Human Cell Atlas have received $200 million from the National Institutes of Health.
"I tend to think of cell tissues really as, like, societies — where cells are the individuals and there's a lot of communication from one cell to another, and some cells are sensing the environment and then sending signals to their neighbors," he says. Technological advances are allowing the cell atlas researchers to eavesdrop on this "conversation" for the first time.
Teichmann, who specializes in immunology, says she expects the cell atlas will take another five to 10 years to complete.
More information on this project can be found on the Human Cell Atlas website