The AIRR Community is helping to lead the PrecisionFDA COVID-19 Precision Immunology App-a-thon.
This is part of the “precisionFDA Challenges” program, which is designed to engage and improve software that analyzes NGS (next generation sequencing data) through community challenges. There were 68 bioinformaticians pre-registered for the Precision Immunology Challenge, and more are expected to join as the app-a-thon continues. These “citizen scientists” will form teams to design software that will make AIRR-seq data more available and accessible for immunologists to realize the promise of immunological big data for improved diagnostics and therapeutics in immunotherapy.
The Precision Immunology Challenge uses AIRR-seq repertoire data from COVID-19 patients downloaded from the AIRR Data Commons (VDJServer and iReceptor Public Archive) through the iReceptor Gateway. These data sets have been carefully chosen to include data on patient demography and clinical outcome in order to illuminate the relationship between personalized adaptive immunity molecular data and COVID-19 disease variables.
The AIRR Community Diagnostics Working Group published a blog post as part of this effort, explaining the possible uses of AIRR-seq data in the clinic in the near future.
The app-a-thon runs through February 2021 at which time the apps will be judged for usability, impact and innovation.
