Purpose:
To advance AIRR-seq for clinical use, i.e. in prognosis, diagnostics, and disease monitoring. The working group strives to uncover why there has been little translation of the tremendous progress in the field of AIRR-seq into the clinics. Furthermore, the working group aims to identify and promote ways of expanding AIRR-seq techniques into general clinical use. This covers both sequencing technologies and analytical methods and will be achieved through:
- Evaluation of the usage of AIRR-seq data for diagnostic purposes. These include diagnosis, prognosis, monitoring purposes, inclusion biomarkers for clinical studies, etc.
- Identification of bottlenecks or challenges for AIRR-seq based clinical assays. These can be software tools, but also data sets or general approaches such as statistical methods, machine learning, pattern recognition, etc.
Plans for 2022/23 include:
- Engagement of key opinion leaders to uncover barriers in translating progress in AIRR-seq into the clinic
- Broadly disseminating the existing and potential possibilities for AIRR-seq in the clinic
- Engagement of regulatory bodies (e.g. FDA) to create strategies to overcome obstacles in bringing AIRR-seq into the clinic
- Production and extension of the reach of additional episodes of the podcast “onAIRR” through support and and direct contribution
- Plan and hold a single meeting with diagnostics as a focal point, with support of the AIRR-C Communications SC, Legal and Ethics WG, and Meetings SC.
- Promotion of the working group at IUIS 2023 and/or FOCIS June 2023
- Coordinate a white paper to regulatory bodies with the working groups opinion on how to best include AIRR-seq in regulatory processes.
Long-term vision and how WG or SC products integrate with the AIRR-C mission:
- Promoting the vision described in our perspective paper The Future of Blood Testing Is the Immunome (Front. Immunol., 15 March 2021) through community outreach and engagement
- Promoting adoption of the standards established in the Standards Working Group for a common framework for clinical classifier discovery
- Acting as an umbrella for clinic-oriented members of various AIRR-C working groups, such as the Biological Resources, Legal and Ethics and Software Working Groups, to brainstorm and promote further development and applications of AIRR-seq clinical testing (e.g. potential project design, standard data collection, software tools, extension to new diseases or uses)
- Representing a link between the AIRR-seq community and regulatory agencies regarding clinical application of AIRR-Seq
Members:
Co-leaders: Susanna Marquez and Ulrik Stervbo
Members: Rohit Arora, Lmar Babrak, Rachael Bashford-Rogers, Magnolia Bostick, Felix Breden, Syed Ahmad Chan Bukhari, Brian Corrie, Lindsay Cowell, Sol Efroni, Khalil El Mazouari, Christopher Gooley , Victor Greiff, David Klatzmann, Yoshinobu Koguchi, Ton Langerak, Theam Soon Lim, Eline Luning Prak, Susanna Marquez (Co-lead), Pieter Meysman, Enkelejda Miho, Nima Nouri, Milena Pavlović, Florian Rubelt, Geir Kjetil Sandve, Tilman Schneider-Hohendorf, Nicholas Schwab , Erand Smakaj, Cinque Soto, Ulrik Stervbo (Co-lead), Johannes Trück, Henk-Jan van den Ham, Eric Waltari, and Corey Watson
Contact: diagnostics@airr-community.org
Products:
- Podcast
- The Future of Blood Testing Is the Immunome (Front. Immunol., 15 March 2021)
- Contributions to Immunogenetics: Methods and Protocols, Methods in Molecular Biology, In press.
- Contributions to data sets shared in the AIRR Data Commons (COVID-19)
