The ESPACE consortium presents a comprehensive multi-omic atlas of the human pancreas, profiling more than 4 million cells from 57 donors across fetal development, adult homeostasis, and type 2 diabetes.

With a particular focus on the exocrine compartment, the study resolves the heterogeneity of acinar and ductal cells and reveals a transcriptional continuum connecting these identities. At the root of this continuum, they identify and validate in situ a rare population of plastic centroacinar-like cells with acinar-to-ductal metaplasia and developmental progenitor-like features.

These findings provide a new framework for investigating cellular plasticity in the healthy human pancreas and how these states may relate to processes involved in pancreatic injury, regeneration, and disease, including pancreatic cancer.

The ESPACE atlas is openly available to the community through an interactive web portal, where researchers can explore and access the single-cell datasets and associated cell states. Elisabet Mereu, from the Institut Josep Carreras in Badalona, is the first author of the paper, published in Cell Metabolism.

PMID 42586061

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmet.2026.07.023

Explore the ESPACE Human Pancreas Atlas: singlecell.charite.de