On AIRR - Immune receptors in the clinic

In Episode 20 of On AIRR, Dr. Lauren Williamson and Dr. Robert Carnahan, both from Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and Dr. Matthew Vogt, from the University of North Carolina, share extreme stories of sample collection that reveal how cutting-edge therapeutic antibody development depends as much on donor generosity and complex global logistics as on scientific innovation. From dramatic effor...

Episode 19 of onAIRR features a lively and insightful conversation with three outstanding scientists committed to advancing pandemic preparedness. Dr. Lauren Williamson and Dr. Robert Carnahan , both from Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and Dr. Matthew Vogt , from the University of North Carolina, share their passion for viral immunology and the art of discovering and developing therapeutic...

In this episode of On AIRR, Dr. Paul Thomas , reviews advances in the field of TCR sequencing. Dr. Thomas is a faculty member in the Department of Immunology of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. His work has advanced our understanding of innate and adaptive immune responses and TCR specificity with a focus on responses to viral infections. In Episode 18 of On AIRR, Dr. Thomas shares his journ...

In this episode of On AIRR, Dr. Bjoern Peters, Professor at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) , explores how high-quality data serves as the foundation for advancing AI-based immunological predictions and diagnostics. Originally from Germany, Dr. Peters began his academic journey in theoretical physics at Hamburg, focusing on quantum optics, before pivoting to biophysics during his PhD a...

Dr. Thierry Mora and Dr. Aleksandra Walczak co-lead the Statistical biophysics group within Laboratoire de physique de l'ENS (LPENS) at the Ecole normale supérieure (Paris, France). Physicists by training, Dr. Mora and Dr. Walczak entered the field of the analysis of the immune system in a time when the first AIRR-seq datasets were becoming available. They have applied biophysics, neuroscience, an...

Dr. Corey Watson is an Associate Professor at the University of Louisville. His work focuses on characterising and cataloguing antibody genetic diversity in human and mouse to better understand disease susceptibility and clinical health outcomes. Dr. William Lees is a researcher at University of London. His work focuses on developing Adaptive Immune Receptor (AIR) reference sets for diverse specie...

Alexander Bernier BCL, JD, LLM, SJD (Candidate) is a Montreal-based lawyer, and a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. His work aims to give scientists a range of compliant data sharing designs that scientists can implement in different situations. In this episode, we discuss the risk of identifying individuals in a biological data set, how this is approached differently...

Maxim Zaslavsky is a computer scientist using machine learning to address problems in immunology. He is currently PhD student at Stanford University. Scott D. Boyd is a physician-scientist and Professor of Pathology and of Food Allergy and Immunology at Stanford University. His group is focused on using high-throughput DNA sequencing and single-cell experiments to analyse human immune responses to...

Dr. Charlotte Deane is Professor of Structural Bioinformatics in the Department of Statistics in University of Oxford (UK) and heads the Oxford Protein Informatics Group. Prof. Deane’s research merges statistics, immunoinformatics, protein structure and small molecule drug discovery. Her group has published several databases that are widely used by academic researchers and in pharmaceutical drug d...

Dr. Xenophon Papademetris is Professor of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, and Biomedical Engineering at Yale University, USA. The research of Prof. Papademetris is in the area of medical image analysis with a focus in the development of medical software. Dr. Papademetris provides an overview of the typical regulatory process for software classified as a medical device. We draw from his experienc...

Prof. Dr. Ralf Küppers is the director of Institute of Cell Biology (Tumor Research), University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. The work of Prof. Küppers revolves around B cell differentiation and function together with pathogenesis of human B cell lymphomas - both Hodgkin and Non-Hodgkin lymphoma. We discuss how micro-dissection and Sanger sequencing is still the method of choice when analysing Hodg...

Vadim Nazarov is Co-Founder & CEO of the startup ImmunoMind . The company focuses on improving the design of adoptive T-cell therapies using multi-omics technologies. Vadim's career began at Dr. Dmitry Chudakov’s Laboratory of Adaptive Immunity, where he developed the now discontinued R-package TcR. The replacement package ‘ immunarch ’ is continuously developed by ImmunoMind.   The episode is hos...

Dr. Adi Barzel is an associate professor in the department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology at Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel. Adi is President at Israeli Society of Gene and Cell Therapy. Following Adi’s long standing interest in gene editing, we discuss the therapeutic potential based on Adi’s recent paper “In vivo engineered B cells secrete high titers of broadly neutralizing anti-HIV...

Dr. Encarnita Mariotti-Ferrandiz is associate professor in Immunology at Sorbonne Université, Paris, France. Encarnita is Chair-Elect of the AIRR-Community. The discussion focuses on sample quality and how to assess this. We draw on two papers during the discussion: “Benchmarking of T cell receptor repertoire profiling methods reveals large systematic biases” (Nature Biotechnology; 2021; https://d...

Dr. Brian Corrie is a computer scientist from Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. Brian is the Technical Director for the iReceptor Plus Project, and architect behind the iReceptor repository ( https://www.ireceptor-plus.com ). Dr. Scott Christley‬ is a computational biologist from UT Southwestern, Texas, USA. Scott is the software development manager for VDJServer ( https://vdjse...

Today we discuss machine learning with Dr. Lindsay Cowell and Dr. Victor Greiff. Machine learning is about pattern recognition and in AIRR-seq the patterns link to diseases and antigen binding. AIRR is nearly a perfect machine learning problem because the underlying patterns are unclear and complex - it is essentially looking for the needle in a needle stack. Dr. Cowell is from the Biomedical Info...

Dr. Jacob Glanville is founder and CEO of Centivax and  founder of Distributed Bio, acquired by Charles River in 2021. His work focuses on understanding and engineering  the repertoires of T and B cells to improve the response to pathogens. In this episode we discuss how to analyze receptor specificity and use this to create therapeutic antibodies and optimize vaccine response. AIRR Community Meet...

Anton Langerak is Professor and head of Laboratory Medical Immunology at the Department of Immunology, Erasmus MC in Rotterdam, Netherlands and chair of coordination of the EuroClonality-NGS working group ( https://euroclonality.org/ngs/about and https://euroclonality.org ). He has been working on chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) for many years and in this episode we discuss the signatures of B...

In this episode, we discuss the interest of Lindsay Cowell from UT Southwestern in creating a framework to enable deeper understanding of AIRR-Seq in health and disease. Comments are welcome at the inbox of onairr@airr-community.org or on social media under the hashtag #onAIRR. Further information can be found here: https://www.antibodysociety.org/the-airr-community/airr-c-podcast/

Today's guest is Nina Luning Prak from the University of Pennsylvania. We talk a bit about the AIRR-Community but mostly about diagnosis of B or T cell malignancies and minimal residual disease evaluation and tracking of B cell clones in autoimmunity. Comments are welcome at the inbox of onairr@airr-community.org or on social media under the hashtag #onAIRR. Further information can be found here:...