Deciphering the human immunome

Abstract

Technological advances in next-generation DNA sequencing offer great potential to probe the human immune system. On 3 April 2015, leading immunologists and bioinformatics scientists met to consider how best to harness these advances for decoding the human immunome.

Keywords:

• antigen-specific repertoires
• B-cell and T-cell receptors
• bioinformatics
• human immunome
• vaccines and immunotherapeutics

Acknowledgments

We thank the participants from the workshop which included the following: R Arnaout (Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center), B Briney (Scripps Research Institute), T Broering (AbVitro, Inc.), JE Crowe Jr. (Vanderbilt University School of Medicine), D Johnson (Gigagen, Inc.), W Koff (IAVI), S Mallal (Vanderbilt University School of Medicine), A Mentzer (Oxford University), T Moody (Duke University), R Scheurmann (J. Craig Venter Institute) and D Soghoian (Google, Inc.). We also thank L Gieber, S Glass and M Mayo for workshop preparations, logistical and organizational support, referencing and copy-editing.

Financial & competing interests disclosure

JE Crowe Jr is a member of the Scientific Advisory Boards of PaxVax, CompuVax, GigaGen and Rensavir, is an inventor of biologics licensed to MedImmune, Mapp Biopharmaceuticals, Sanofi Pasteur and GlaxoSmithKline and has ongoing collaborations with Novartis, Merck and Genmab. The Human Vaccines Project workshop was supported by grants to IAVI (WC Koff) from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and GlaxoSmithKline. The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.

Key issues

• Next-generation sequencing technologies now enable very detailed examination of human immune repertoires.

• Investigators in the Human Vaccines Project propose an effort to define the Human Immunome, with an initial goal to sequence 1000 human B- and T-cell repertoires.

• Major technical challenges remain for developing reliable repertoire sequence collections with minimal sequencing errors and naturally paired immune receptor chains at large scale.

• New tools and public databases are needed for rapid analysis of massive immune repertoire sequence collections.

• Linking the predicted or determined structure and function of immune receptors to large sequence collections could facilitate rational structure-based vaccine design.

Notes