[1] The initiative was announced by a consortium after its inaugural meeting in London in October 2016, which established the first phase of the project.
[11] In October 2017, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative announced funding for 38 projects related to the Human Cell Atlas.
[10] The Translational Genomics Research Institute received a grant to develop a standard for the "processing and storage of solid tissues for single-cell RNA sequencing", compared to the typical practice of relying on the average of sequencing multiple cells.
[13] The program is also backed by European Union, the National Institutes of Health in the United States, and the Manton Foundation.
[9] In April 2018, the first data set from the project was released, representing 530,000 immune system cells collected from bone marrow and cord blood.