The inaugural AIRR Community Event, entitled “Antibody & T-Cell Receptor Data Integration Planning Meeting” was held at the SFU IRMACS Centre from September 12 – 15, 2014. This planning meeting was a gathering of international stakeholders in the area of Immunogenetics, with the goal of setting the topics and organizing a large Community Meeting for May 29th – June 1st, 2015. From the planning meeting web site:

“… the goal of the proposed set of workshops in the May 2015 Community Meeting is to bring together all stakeholders in the use of NGS technologies to study antibody (Ab)/B-cell and T-cell receptor (TcR) repertoires. Attendees of the Community Meeting will not be restricted to the HIV/AIDS field, but will also include experts in vaccine development against a broad range of infectious agents, T-cell-based cancer therapeutics, and Ab-based therapeutics against cancer, autoimmune and inflammatory diseases, along with representatives from the diversity of communities invested in research (e.g., from scientific journals, public granting agencies, bioinformatics, biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries, intellectual-property-based legal firms, university and other ethics boards/councils, patient and community advocacy groups).”

For more information, see the event web site at: http://www.irmacs.sfu.ca/events/workshop-antibody-tcell-receptor-data

The first Adaptive Immune Receptor Repertoire (AIRR) Community meeting was held at Simon Fraser University May 29 – June 1, 2015. The meeting brought together a wide range of international researchers to formulate best-practice recommendations for: (i) assuring NGS data quality, (ii) developing and evaluating NGS data analysis tools, (iii) creating a data infrastructure for sharing NGS data sets, and (iv) solving the ethical, legal, and logistical challenges inherent in dealing with these databases. This meeting was the catalyst for creating both the AIRR website you are visiting today as well as the forming of the AIRR Working Groups.