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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.

Successful AIRR Community Meeting V

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The fifth AIRR Community meeting (#AIRRC5) was held virtually Dec 8–10, 2020. The theme of this meeting was “Zooming in to the AIRR Community” connecting the global AIRR research community despite the pandemic for a series of Working Group & Sub-committee presentations, scientific sessions, interactive poster sessions, software tool demonstrations and networking events.

AIRR Community meetings are the premier event for research on adaptive immune-receptor repertoires. They are also the primary location where the AIRR-Community’s Working Groups and Sub-committees come together in one location to discuss how to push standardization in AIRR-sequencing (AIRR-seq) data and analysis forward.  All video recordings can be found here https://www.youtube.com/airrcommunity. All presentations can be found in the AIRR Community Resources section of the website. 

Just as the biology of AIRR is high-dimensional, this meeting’s success was as well!  We gathered some of the numbers that best describe the success of the #AIRRC5 meeting.

  • 1 Keynote speaker: Ignacio Sanz (Emory University School of Medicine, USA)
  • 3 Basic Science Presentations, 3 Biomedical Science Presentations
  • Attendees from 18 countries and 6 continents
  • 161 Registrants 
  • 5 Sponsors 
  • 6 Invited Speakers 
  • 2 Judging Panels 
  • 4 Short Talk Presenters 
  • 28 Poster Presenters 
  • 4 Software Demonstrators 
  • 9 Moderators 
  • 19 Community Presenters 
  • This was the second time a twitter hashtag was used for an AIRR Community Meeting (#AIRRV)
  • We achieved the milestone of more than 100 subscribers for the AIRRC YouTube channel thus enabling a custom YouTube URL: https://www.youtube.com/airrcommunity 
  • In addition to the main meeting, two free pre-meetings were held with over 175 participants
    • Pre-meeting 1: “AIRR-seq in the Pandemic” co-hosted by the AIRR Community and Tsinghua University in China which took place on December 5th/6th
    • Pre-meeting 2 “AIRR-seq Biological Standards and Workflows“ which was hosted by the Biological Resources Working Group on December 7th.

AIRR Community and PrecisionFDA COVID-19 Precision Immunology App-a-thon

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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.

 

Announcing the new AIRR Community Executive Sub-committee!

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As part of the recent AIRR-C Meeting V the Executive Sub-committee election results were announced. Thank you to all nominees for their interest and for letting their names stand and to the many community members that took the time to vote.
We would like to thank Nina Luning Prak for her excellent and tireless work as Chair these past 18 months.  We would also like to recognize Steve Kleinstein for his many years on Exec and for his long standing commitment to the AIRR Community.
Please welcome the new Executive:
Lindsay Cowell, University Texas Southwestern, USA – Chair
Nina Luning Prak, University of Pennsylvania, USA – Past Chair
Victor Greiff, University of Oslo, Norway – Chair-elect
Felix Breden, Simon Fraser University, Canada – Elected Member
Christian Busse – DKFZ, Germany – Elected Member
Encarnita Mariotti-Ferrandiz, – Sorbonne Universite, France – Elected Member

AIRR Community 2021 Plans Ratification Vote!

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AIRR Community Working Groups and Sub-committees presented their 2020 reports and 2021 plans today at AIRR Meeting V: “Zooming in to the AIRR Community.” According to AIRR-C governance these plans must be ratified by the Community.
The reports and plans are available through the AIRR Meeting V meeting platform. Each report is attached to the agenda item that it corresponds to. If you are not registered for Meeting V but an eligible voting member you can access the report slides by logging in to the AIRR Community Resources section of the AIRR website.
Time is short – Voting closes at midnight PDT on December 9th!

Voting is now closed.