News Outlet:
Birmingham Medical News
“When something goes wrong, the immune system knows. It diagnoses the problem and tries to treat it,” Jian Han, M.D., Ph.D., said. “We want to learn what the immune system can teach us about improving our ability to diagnose diseases, evaluate the prognosis of patients and manage their treatment.” An investigator at the nonprofit HudsonAlpha Institute of Biotechnology in Huntsville, Han is leading the Repertoire 10K project, an international collaborative effort to identify disease-specific T cell and B cell receptor sequences in 10,000 patients who have 100 diseases.
The privately funded project is looking for personal biomarkers in people who have cancer or an autoimmune, inflammatory or infectious disease. Information gathered will provide a reference database for research and for identifying immune diseases with a genetic basis.
“The immune repertoire is the sum of T and B cells in a body at any given moment,” Han said. “It’s like a snapshot of health status and a historical record of immune function. It can also offer a clearer view of an individual’s risk for specific diseases.”
You can read the full article on the Birmingham Medical News website.