the official website of the antibody society
Sharing is caring. This has become a key phrase during the COVID-19 pandemic. The AIRR Community proudly announces a designated channel in our data discussion forum B-T.CR (www.b-t.cr). This public resource will list all current and upcoming studies with immune repertoire data on COVID-19.
If you happen to stumble upon AIRR-seq or single cell RNA-seq data of COVID-19 research projects, please add them to the list found here!
Defeating the coronavirus pandemic will require unprecedented cooperation from the research community. This is especially true for the Adaptive Immune Receptor Repertoire Community (AIRR-C), given the paramount importance of antibodies and T cells for vaccines, diagnostics, and therapeutics in viral infection. Therefore, the AIRR-C hereby calls upon its members, and the wider research community, to share experiences, resources, samples, and data as openly and freely as possible, and to work within their respective systems to break down barriers to achieve this goal, subject to the overarching directives of respect, privacy, and protection for patients and all people. We are in this together.
The idea of a Diagnostics WG originated in May at the AIRR-C IV meeting in Genoa, Italy. The three initiators, Florian Rubelt (Roche Sequencing Solutions), Nicolas Schwab (UK Münster) and Christopher Gooley (Microsoft Research), felt that it was time for AIRR-based diagnostics to make their way into the clinic. The transition from an academic environment to a clinical setting creates new challenges, which will be of high interest within the AIRR Community and beyond. The AIRR-Community has a unique advantage to connect people from academia and industry from around the world and provides a great basis to identify and address these new challenges in the AIRR field.
A group of interested participants held an ad hoc session at the Genoa meeting and at this point the AIRR-C Diagnostics Interim Working Group has held 9 calls with over 30 participants. Early discussions have revolved around identifying the set of tasks and the format of the group.
A first agreed-upon product is a commentary about AIRR-based diagnostics. This initial commentary manuscript is meant to introduce AIRR-based diagnostics and the potential future opportunities to a clinical audience. The group has also ran a survey to identify the background and interests of the group. One outcome of the survey was to identify bottlenecks and challenges bringing AIRR based diagnostics to the clinic.
Currently, the AIRR-C Diagnostics interim working group is led by Florian Rubelt, Nicholas Schwab and Christopher Gooley and has more than 60 members.
For more information and updates please refer to the AIRR-C Diagnostics Interim Working Group website.
If you are interested in joining, please contact diagnostics@airrc.antibodysociety.org
We are excited to announce that AIRR Community Meeting V “Exploring New Frontiers” will be held in La Jolla, CA from December 8-12, 2020.
Meetings and presentations will take place at Scripps Research and the Hilton La Jolla Torrey Pines.
See AIRR C Meeting V Program at a Glance.
AIRR-C Executive Sub-committee member Christian Busse gave a talk at the deRSE2019 (Konferenz für ForschungssoftwareentwicklerInnen in Deutschland – Conference for software engineers in Germany) on building scientific communities using the AIRR-C as an example.
Check out his talk here: https://doi.org/10.5446/42486.
