ARCHITECTURE AND TOOLS FOR THE QUERY OF ANTIBODY AND T-CELL RECEPTOR SEQUENCING DATA REPOSITORIES FOR ENABLING IMPROVED PERSONALIZED MEDICINE AND IMMUNOTHERAPY

ARCHITECTURE AND TOOLS FOR THE QUERY OF ANTIBODY AND T-CELL RECEPTOR SEQUENCING DATA REPOSITORIES FOR ENABLING IMPROVED PERSONALIZED MEDICINE AND IMMUNOTHERAPY

Background: Many cutting-edge therapies rely on manipulating the adaptive immune system, which has evolved a vast diversity (repertoire) of immune receptors to recognize and remove pathogens and cancer cells. The sequence-data sets characterizing this Adaptive Immune Receptor Repertoire (i.e., AIRR-seq data) have the potential to revolutionize vaccine research and the development of therapies against autoimmune diseases and cancer; however, AIRR-seq data are typically stored and curated by individual labs, using a variety of tools and technologies. Sharing these data in a common way across disease studies, labs, and institutions around the world will improve our ability to recognize patterns in basic research and clinical trials, and increase our confidence in these patterns. The existing iReceptor Platform uses community-developed standards to facilitate sharing of AIRR-seq data by enabling queries across a system of distributed data repositories. Project: The iReceptor Plus consortium of researchers from Europe and Canada will address several key challenges to optimally sharing AIRR-seq data among public and industrial partners: protecting patient privacy and the intellectual property of partners, performing complex analyses on data brought together from many sources, and expanding the size and number of repositories that can be integrated in the network. Impact: The iReceptor Plus project will facilitate sharing of AIRR-seq data among multiple institutions, including biopharmaceutical companies and researchers working with human confidential data, across multiple diseases, treatments and populations. This will lead to a better understanding of the causes of infectious and autoimmune diseases and cancer, which can lead to early detection and suggest novel therapies. These improvements will reduce the social and economic burden of these diseases, advance Europe and Canada’s leadership role in immunotherapy, and contribute to improved patient care worldwide