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Join us for “Fundamentals of the Immune System”, Parts I & II

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Part I:  Organization of the immune system.
Thursday June 3, 2021, 11am – 1pm ET. 

Part II:  The immune system in action.
Tuesday June 15, 2021, 11am – 1pm ET.

In this 2-part workshop on the fundamentals of the immune system, Dr. Jamie Scott, Professor Emerita, Simon Fraser University, Canada, will first provide an overview of humoral and cellular immunity, and the basic structure of the immune system, including its cells, tissues and compartments, along with the “superhighway” of the immune system: the circulatory and lymphatic systems. In that context, innate and adaptive immune systems and their interaction, and the general timing and dynamics of immune responses will be presented.

The processes of lymphocyte development, including the various B- and T-cell subsets, positive and negative selection, and the genetic basis of B-cell and T-cell receptor diversification, will be presented to provide a clear idea of what adaptive-immune receptor repertoires (AIRRs) are, and in general terms, how they are currently assessed via high-throughput sequencing. Dr. Scott will then cover the signaling, activation, proliferation and differentiation of T-cell and B-cell clones in the context of lymphoid compartments where antigen is concentrated and presented to naïve and memory B and T cells. The role of co-stimulation in determining the type immune response generated will be emphasized.

In Part II, Dr. Scott will review the orchestration of systemic and mucosal immune responses, including the roles of tolerance and inflammation in these processes. Examples of immune responses to vaccines, chronic viral infection, and/or cancer, as well as autoimmunity, will be presented as variations on a common theme, reiterating the dynamics of the immune response. Some engineered immunotherapies, such as therapeutic antibodies, CAR-T cells and dendritic-cell vaccines, will be introduced as well.

The importance of AIRR-sequencing data to our understanding of immune responses will be emphasized throughout the latter half of this workshop.

Click here to register for Part I

Click here to register for Part II

AIRR Community and Tsinghua University discuss Chinese research using AIRR-seq data to study adaptive immune response in COVID-19 patients

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A meeting focusing on Chinese researchers’ use of AIRR-seq data to study the adaptive immune response – especially in COVID-19 patients – was held recently by the AIRR Community and Tsinghua University.

The purpose of this co-organized meeting was to expose AIRR-seq researchers in China to the philosophy and tools developed by the AIRR Community and help integrate researchers from all over the world through the AIRR Community.

Although collaboration and sharing data internationally is complicated and difficult, this successful meeting was an important step in forming the relationships necessary for overcoming many of these challenges.

Tsinghua University is a major research university in Beijing and a member of the C9 League of Chinese universities. Since its establishment exactly 110 years ago, it has produced many notable leaders in science, engineering, politics, business, academia, and culture. The university is ranked as the 15th best university in the world in the QS World University Rankings and No.1 in Asia by the Asia University Rankings and the U.S. News and World Report.

The meeting followed a hybrid format, combining online lectures by AIRR Community members in the US and Europe in conjunction with an in-person meeting in Shenzhen, China that was organized by Professor Xiao Liu of Tsinghua University’s Shenzhen campus.

The in-person, all-day meeting was held on December 6, 2020 in Shenzhen, which corresponded to Saturday evening December 5 in North America.

The full meeting agenda can be found on the meeting web page and the meeting recording has been posted on the AIRR-C YouTube Channel.

 

Prof. Victor Greiff’s webinar is now available On Demand!

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In case you missed Prof. Victor Greiff’s very popular webcast on best practices relating to the conception, analysis and performance of adaptive immune receptor repertoire studies, the On Demand version is now online!

High-throughput sequencing has enabled the capture of adaptive immune receptor repertoire (AIRR) data at unprecedented depth and precision. This webinar gives an in-depth walk-through of best practices to conceive, analyze and perform AIRR studies for answering fundamental immunological questions as well as discovering novel immunodiagnostic biomarkers and design (therapeutic) immune receptors. Specifically, Dr. Greiff addresses current approaches to perform AIRR-compliant AIRR data processing encompassing bulk and single-cell approaches and experimental and bioinformatics quality control. Furthermore, he summarizes the computational methods that have been recently developed to deconstruct the high-dimensional complexity of immune receptor repertoires, e.g., 1) diversity-, 2) phylogenetic-, 3) networks- and 4) machine learning-based methods that have been applied to dissect and understand the diversity, architecture, evolution and antigen specificity of immune repertoires. Finally, Dr. Greiff discusses experimental and computational methods in light of their underlying assumptions, limitations and pitfalls and highlight promising avenues of future research in basic and applied AIRR systems immunology.

Click here to access the On Demand webinar!

The AIRR Community has started a Webinar Series

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The AIRR Community is pleased to announce that it has started a Webinar Series. Webinars will include current AIRR-related topics as well as tutorials. The inaugural Webinar is on “Steps in data processing and analysis of adaptive immune receptor repertoires: best practices, pitfalls, and future directions” by Prof. Victor Greiff, University of Oslo (Norway), April 6, 2021. The Seminar is free, available on-demand and on the AIRR YouTube channel.

 

The AIRR-C Diagnostics Working Group published on the future of blood testing using AIRR technology

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The AIRR-C Diagnostics Working Group recently published a manuscript on using the immunome for blood testing in Frontiers in Immunology. In the manuscript, the AIRR-C discusses opportunities as well as the current state of immunome-based diagnostics and highlights some of the challenges involved. The authors conclude with a call to clinicians, researchers, and others to join efforts AIRR-C to realize the diagnostic potential of the immunome. In the paper, the researchers define immunome as “millions of V(D)J-rearranged antibody and T cell receptor genes collectively expressed by a person’s B cells (antibodies) and T cells”.

The Future of Blood Testing Is the Immunome. (Frontiers in Immunology, 2021).

Arnaout RA, Prak ETL, Schwab N, Rubelt F. Adaptive Immune Receptor Repertoire Community.