Overview

• Researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Cambridge and Newcastle mapped human skin fibroblasts across healthy tissue and 23 skin disorders, publishing the findings in Nature Immunology.
• They integrated single-cell RNA sequencing, spatial transcriptomics and deep learning to analyze 32 datasets spanning 2.1 million cells, yielding 357,276 high-quality fibroblasts for comparison.
• The team reports distinct fibroblast populations that occupy defined tissue neighborhoods in healthy skin and eight overall types, enabling high-resolution mapping of function and location.
• Machine-learning analysis uncovered three recurring disease-associated fibroblast states present across organs in conditions such as inflammatory bowel disease, rheumatoid arthritis, scarring diseases and lung cancer.
• Authors propose these shared states as potential universal drug targets and have released open data plus an online tool through the Human Cell Atlas effort to support further research.