What is the field of immunogenomics?
What is the field of immunogenomics?
Learn about the immune system and the field of immunogenetics.
HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
Transcript
[Music in]
NARRATOR: The immune system is a fascinating, wonderful network in our bodies that functions every minute of every day without our knowing. It's a finely tuned system that protects each of us and is a critical part of health and well-being. It's like an umbrella, protecting us from the environment. The immune system defends us against infectious diseases and also from the constant bombardment of bacteria, viruses, microorganisms, and other foreign materials. With nearly every disease, something goes wrong in our body's immune system. HudsonAlpha is working to better understand how the immune system speaks to us when it's fighting disease and how that information can be used to improve our health. This is called immunogenomics. Think of immunogenomics as the intersection of genomics--the study of all our genes and their functions--and the immune system.
RICK MYERS: What happens is that something goes wrong in disease with our immune system, and practically every disease has some kind of immune component. We have researchers coming in with blood samples from many, many different diseases that Jian and Shawn Levy and the rest of our team have been going through and applying the technology to see what the immune system looks like in those particular diseases.
NARRATOR: By looking at the DNA of our immune systems, researchers at HudsonAlpha are learning how to diagnose and treat disease much earlier and much more effectively than we do now. HudsonAlpha's research in immunogenomics is being done with collaborators and physicians throughout the world who see the importance of unlocking the secrets of the immune system. HudsonAlpha is applying its understanding of immunogenomics in a project called Repertoire 10,000, or R10K. Led by Dr. Jian Han, the R10K project aims to sequence the immune-system DNA of 100 patients for 100 diseases, making a total of 10,000 samples. From this study researchers at HudsonAlpha hope to learn information about our immune system that will lead to earlier, more accurate diagnoses and treatments for many types of disease. Like many research projects at HudsonAlpha, R10K is a global project with physicians and patients from all over the world, including right here in Huntsville.
RICK MYERS: Jian Han's technologies allow you to take the tiniest amount of blood from someone and then figure out what their immune system is producing at that moment. You do this over a time course--during disease, for instance, while a disease is progressing or maybe while you're in remission from a disease--and we can learn an enormous amount about how our immune system is responding to that or maybe even responsible for it.
[Music out]
NARRATOR: The immune system is a fascinating, wonderful network in our bodies that functions every minute of every day without our knowing. It's a finely tuned system that protects each of us and is a critical part of health and well-being. It's like an umbrella, protecting us from the environment. The immune system defends us against infectious diseases and also from the constant bombardment of bacteria, viruses, microorganisms, and other foreign materials. With nearly every disease, something goes wrong in our body's immune system. HudsonAlpha is working to better understand how the immune system speaks to us when it's fighting disease and how that information can be used to improve our health. This is called immunogenomics. Think of immunogenomics as the intersection of genomics--the study of all our genes and their functions--and the immune system.
RICK MYERS: What happens is that something goes wrong in disease with our immune system, and practically every disease has some kind of immune component. We have researchers coming in with blood samples from many, many different diseases that Jian and Shawn Levy and the rest of our team have been going through and applying the technology to see what the immune system looks like in those particular diseases.
NARRATOR: By looking at the DNA of our immune systems, researchers at HudsonAlpha are learning how to diagnose and treat disease much earlier and much more effectively than we do now. HudsonAlpha's research in immunogenomics is being done with collaborators and physicians throughout the world who see the importance of unlocking the secrets of the immune system. HudsonAlpha is applying its understanding of immunogenomics in a project called Repertoire 10,000, or R10K. Led by Dr. Jian Han, the R10K project aims to sequence the immune-system DNA of 100 patients for 100 diseases, making a total of 10,000 samples. From this study researchers at HudsonAlpha hope to learn information about our immune system that will lead to earlier, more accurate diagnoses and treatments for many types of disease. Like many research projects at HudsonAlpha, R10K is a global project with physicians and patients from all over the world, including right here in Huntsville.
RICK MYERS: Jian Han's technologies allow you to take the tiniest amount of blood from someone and then figure out what their immune system is producing at that moment. You do this over a time course--during disease, for instance, while a disease is progressing or maybe while you're in remission from a disease--and we can learn an enormous amount about how our immune system is responding to that or maybe even responsible for it.
[Music out]