Scientists assemble worlds first immune cell atlas from diverse Asian populations

SINGAPORE – Researchers from the A*STAR Genome Institute of Singapore (A*STAR GIS), together with collaborators from South Korea, Japan, Thailand, and India, have assembled the world’s first Asian Immune Diversity Atlas (AIDA)—a multi-national survey of human blood at single-cell resolution. The landmark study, published in the scientific journal Cell in March 2025, has the potential to advance Precision Medicine and empower the development of next-generation diagnostics and therapeutics tailored specifically for Asian populations.

The study of human immune cells provides critical insights into diagnosing, understanding, and treating infectious diseases, autoimmune disorders, and blood cancers. Clinically, immune cell proportions are already used to diagnose conditions like tuberculosis and leukaemia. Recent technological advances in single-cell genomics now allow researchers to analyse individual cells in unprecedented detail, enabling more precise diagnostics and targeted treatments—for example, distinguishing immune signatures associated with lupus or predicting responses of cancers to immunotherapy.

However, diagnostic approaches developed using data from one population, such as Europeans, often do not accurately translate to other populations, for example Asians. Healthy immune baselines and disease risk factors can vary widely due to differences in age, sex, genetics, lifestyle, and environment. Historically, biomedical research has largely focused on European populations, underscoring the importance of creating tailored diagnostic criteria based on data from Asian populations.

Profiling Asia’s Immune Diversity at Single-Cell Resolution

To address this gap, the A*STAR GIS-led AIDA consortium profiled the healthy immune systems of diverse Asian populations. Using advanced single-cell genomics methods, the researchers analysed over 1.2 million immune cells from blood samples of 625 healthy donors across five Asian countries. AIDA is a flagship project of the Asia network of the international Human Cell Atlas (HCA) consortium, which aims to create comprehensive reference maps of human cells to enhance disease diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment.

The AIDA team[1] established healthy immune reference ranges for multiple Asian population groups, including Singaporean Chinese, Malay, and Indian ethnicities. They assessed how factors like ethnicity, age, and sex influenced immune cell proportions and gene expression. The results revealed that self-reported ethnicity contributes nearly as much as sex to variation in blood cell proportions, with significant differences also observed across ethnicities in age-related and sex-related cellular changes. Additionally, certain cell states and gene products showed 2- to 8-fold higher abundance in specific populations, providing insights which may help refine biomarkers for diagnosing diseases and predicting disease risks.

Further, the researchers identified molecular properties potentially unique to Asian populations, which could help us understand genetic causes of infectious and autoimmune diseases, as well as differences in disease susceptibility. The AIDA resource, available on the Chan Zuckerberg Cell by Gene website and the HCA Data Portal, offers a powerful reference for developing tailored diagnostic and therapeutic strategies better suited to Asian patients.

A Landmark Collaboration for Precision Health in Asia

The collaborative nature and significance of the AIDA project reflect the urgent need to expand biomedical research beyond traditionally studied populations.

Dr Shyam Prabhakar, Associate Director at A*STAR GIS and senior author of the study, shared, “In the next phase of research, we are scaling up the AIDA resource, and extending our single-cell genomics analysis to Asian patients, including those in Singapore. We foresee that AIDA will empower the development of Precision Medicine efforts in Singapore, Asia, and beyond.”

Dr Jay Shin, Senior Group Leader at A*STAR GIS, Team Leader at RIKEN, Japan, and senior author of the study, said, “The AIDA resource is the fruit of a hugely enjoyable and collegial collaboration across the Human Cell Atlas Asia network, through which we brought together investigators from across Asia to lead and engage in world-leading research.”

Dr Park Woong-Yang, Director of Samsung Genome Institute, Samsung Medical Center in South Korea and senior author of the study, said, “Historically, most studies have focused on populations of European ancestries, and biomedical properties are less well-understood for non-European donors. We have demonstrated the importance of including diverse populations in biomedical research.”

Dr Alexandra-Chloé Villani, Institute Member of the Broad Institute, Assistant Professor at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and author of the study, said, "This is a pivotal step towards the Human Cell Atlas mission of creating a comprehensive reference map of human cells to transform our understanding of health and disease and to drive major advances in healthcare and medicine worldwide. This groundbreaking study paves the way for the future development of diagnostics and therapies tailored to individual populations."

ANNEX A: Additional quotes

Dr Kock Kian Hong, Scientist at A*STAR GIS and first author of the study, said, “We were able to examine cells and genes, including those known to be relevant to disease risk, pathogenesis, and diagnostics, at an unprecedented resolution and scale, given the single-cell genomics approaches employed by our AIDA consortium.”

Dr Patrick Tan, Executive Director of Precision Health Research, Singapore (PRECISE), Senior Vice Dean (Research) at Duke-NUS Medical School, and Chief Scientific Officer at A*STAR GIS, said, “This effort from scientists from Singapore, South Korea, Japan, Thailand, and India establishes a paradigm for large-scale single-cell genomics projects at the regional and global scale, with the potential to transform diagnostics for patients across Asia.”

Dr Norbert Tavares, Senior Science Program Manager for Cell Science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, said, “The data generated by AIDA will contribute to a robust and unique collection of single-cell datasets to the HCA and available on Chan Zuckerberg Cell by Gene. The insights derived from this project will benefit researchers around the world and make progress toward understanding health and disease.”

[1] AIDA is supported by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative; A*STAR in Singapore as well as the Health for Life in Singapore (HELIOS) Study; Samsung Genome Institute, Samsung Medical Center and Yongin Severance Medical Center in South Korea; RIKEN in Japan and the Japan Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology; Mahidol University in Thailand and the Thailand Program Management Unit for Competitiveness Enhancement (PMU-C); and the John C. Martin Centre for Liver Research and Innovations (JCMLRI) and the National Institute of Biomedical Genomics (NIBMG) in India. The study was led by Dr Shyam Prabhakar, Associate Director, A*STAR GIS, Singapore; Dr Park Woong-Yang, Director, Samsung Genome Institute, Samsung Medical Center, South Korea; and Dr Jay Shin, Senior Group Leader, A*STAR GIS, Singapore, and Team Leader, RIKEN, Japan.