The fourth AIRR Community meeting (#AIRRC4) took place at the University of Genoa, May 11–15, 2019, in an unusual and gorgeous location. All talks were held in a 17th century church that has been repurposed for conference settings. The overarching theme of this meeting was “Bridging the Gaps” which aimed to address technological gaps between the amounts of accumulated data and our ability to process them, and the need for more involvement of stakeholder communities (industry, clinicians, patient communities) for the dissemination and implementation of the standards developed by the AIRR Community. 

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 meeting documents, slides, and video recordings can be found here:
https://www.antibodysociety.org/the-airr-community/meetings/communityiv/

Just like the biology of immune repertoires is high-dimensional, this meeting’s success was as well!  We gathered some of the numbers that best describe the success of the AIRR C IV meeting.

• 2 Keynote speakers: Sai T. Reddy (ETH, Zürich, CH), Antonio Lanzavecchia (Instituto di Ricerca in Biomedicina, Bellinzona, CH)
• 154 attendees from 5 continents and 22 countries
• 18 invited speakers
• 15 sponsors
• This was the first time a twitter hashtag was used for an AIRR Community Meeting
• Two pre-meeting workshops were held, teaching the basics of immunology, and of AIRR-seq data analysis 
• AIRR-seq Tool demonstrations and Pipeline and Data Repository tutorial sessions were held