On AIRR - Immune receptors in the clinic

AIRR-Community

A monthly podcast with a focus on the use and application of T and B cell receptor repertoires in diagnostics and other clinical settings. read less
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On AIRR 15: Germline databases or adventures into the allelic underworld with Dr. Corey Watson and Dr. William Lees
Oct 30 2023
On AIRR 15: Germline databases or adventures into the allelic underworld with Dr. Corey Watson and Dr. William Lees
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 species and the annotation of experimental sequence data. In this episode we talk about the recent work by the Germline Database Working Group of the AIRR-Community. The accuracy of V and J gene segment assignment improves with the quality of the reference germline set. The accurate assignment is critical for characterization of somatic hypermutation. We discuss the challenges in creating a database to hold all relevant and potentially relevant germline information, especially in the light of increased discovery rate through technological advances and improved analysis pipelines. We also reflect on the complexity in handling personalised germline reference sets. The episode is hosted by Dr. Ulrik Stervbo and Dr. Zhaoqing Ding. Comments are welcome to the inbox of onairr@airr-community.org  or on social media under the tag #onAIRR. Further information can be found here: https://www.antibodysociety.org/the-airr-community/airr-c-podcast.  Website of the AIRR-C Germline Database Working Group https://www.antibodysociety.org/the-airr-community/airr-working-groups/germline_database/  Papers mentioned Collins, Andrew M., Mats Ohlin, Martin Corcoran, James M. Heather, Duncan Ralph, Mansun Law, Jesus Martínez-Barnetche, et al. 2023. “AIRR-C Human IG Reference Sets: Curated Sets of Immunoglobulin Heavy and Light Chain Germline Genes.” BioRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.09.01.555348 Rodriguez, Oscar L., Yana Safonova, Catherine A. Silver, Kaitlyn Shields, William S. Gibson, Justin T. Kos, David Tieri, et al. 2023. “Genetic Variation in the Immunoglobulin Heavy Chain Locus Shapes the Human Antibody Repertoire.” Nature Communications 14 (1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-40070-x Lees, William D., Scott Christley, Ayelet Peres, Justin T. Kos, Brian Corrie, Duncan Ralph, Felix Breden, et al. 2023. “AIRR Community Curation and Standardised Representation for Immunoglobulin and T Cell Receptor Germline Sets.” Immunoinformatics (Amsterdam, Netherlands) 10 (100025): 100025. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.immuno.2023.100025 Jackson, Katherine J. L., Justin T. Kos, William Lees, William S. Gibson, Melissa Laird Smith, Ayelet Peres, Gur Yaari, et al. 2022. “A BALB/c IGHV Reference Set, Defined by Haplotype Analysis of Long-Read VDJ-C Sequences From F1 (BALB/c x C57BL/6) Mice.” Frontiers in Immunology 13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fimmu.2022.888555 Ford, Easton E., David Tieri, Oscar L. Rodriguez, Nancy J. Francoeur, Juan Soto, Justin T. Kos, Ayelet Peres, et al. 2023. “FLAIRR-Seq: A Method for Single-Molecule Resolution of near Full-Length Antibody H Chain Repertoires.” The Journal of Immunology 210 (10): 1607–19. https://doi.org/10.4049/jimmunol.2200825 Omer, Aviv, Ayelet Peres, Oscar L. Rodriguez, Corey T. Watson, William Lees, Pazit Polak, Andrew M. Collins, and Gur Yaari. 2022. “T Cell Receptor Beta Germline Variability Is Revealed by Inference from Repertoire Data.” Genome Medicine 14 (1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13073-021-01008-4 Rodriguez, Oscar L., Catherine A. Silver, Kaitlyn Shields, Melissa L. Smith, and Corey T. Watson. 2022. “Targeted Long-Read Sequencing Facilitates Phased Diploid Assembly and Genotyping of the Human T Cell Receptor Alpha, Delta, and Beta Loci.” Cell Genomics 2 (12): 100228. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.xgen.2022.100228  Tools mentioned TIgGER (Immcantation) https://tigger.readthedocs.io/en/stable IgDiscover https://github.com/NBISweden/IgDiscover Partis https://github.com/psathyrella/partis MiXCR https://mixcr.com

Episodes

On AIRR 15: Germline databases or adventures into the allelic underworld with Dr. Corey Watson and Dr. William Lees
Oct 30 2023
On AIRR 15: Germline databases or adventures into the allelic underworld with Dr. Corey Watson and Dr. William Lees
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 species and the annotation of experimental sequence data. In this episode we talk about the recent work by the Germline Database Working Group of the AIRR-Community. The accuracy of V and J gene segment assignment improves with the quality of the reference germline set. The accurate assignment is critical for characterization of somatic hypermutation. We discuss the challenges in creating a database to hold all relevant and potentially relevant germline information, especially in the light of increased discovery rate through technological advances and improved analysis pipelines. We also reflect on the complexity in handling personalised germline reference sets. The episode is hosted by Dr. Ulrik Stervbo and Dr. Zhaoqing Ding. Comments are welcome to the inbox of onairr@airr-community.org  or on social media under the tag #onAIRR. Further information can be found here: https://www.antibodysociety.org/the-airr-community/airr-c-podcast.  Website of the AIRR-C Germline Database Working Group https://www.antibodysociety.org/the-airr-community/airr-working-groups/germline_database/  Papers mentioned Collins, Andrew M., Mats Ohlin, Martin Corcoran, James M. Heather, Duncan Ralph, Mansun Law, Jesus Martínez-Barnetche, et al. 2023. “AIRR-C Human IG Reference Sets: Curated Sets of Immunoglobulin Heavy and Light Chain Germline Genes.” BioRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.09.01.555348 Rodriguez, Oscar L., Yana Safonova, Catherine A. Silver, Kaitlyn Shields, William S. Gibson, Justin T. Kos, David Tieri, et al. 2023. “Genetic Variation in the Immunoglobulin Heavy Chain Locus Shapes the Human Antibody Repertoire.” Nature Communications 14 (1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-40070-x Lees, William D., Scott Christley, Ayelet Peres, Justin T. Kos, Brian Corrie, Duncan Ralph, Felix Breden, et al. 2023. “AIRR Community Curation and Standardised Representation for Immunoglobulin and T Cell Receptor Germline Sets.” Immunoinformatics (Amsterdam, Netherlands) 10 (100025): 100025. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.immuno.2023.100025 Jackson, Katherine J. L., Justin T. Kos, William Lees, William S. Gibson, Melissa Laird Smith, Ayelet Peres, Gur Yaari, et al. 2022. “A BALB/c IGHV Reference Set, Defined by Haplotype Analysis of Long-Read VDJ-C Sequences From F1 (BALB/c x C57BL/6) Mice.” Frontiers in Immunology 13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fimmu.2022.888555 Ford, Easton E., David Tieri, Oscar L. Rodriguez, Nancy J. Francoeur, Juan Soto, Justin T. Kos, Ayelet Peres, et al. 2023. “FLAIRR-Seq: A Method for Single-Molecule Resolution of near Full-Length Antibody H Chain Repertoires.” The Journal of Immunology 210 (10): 1607–19. https://doi.org/10.4049/jimmunol.2200825 Omer, Aviv, Ayelet Peres, Oscar L. Rodriguez, Corey T. Watson, William Lees, Pazit Polak, Andrew M. Collins, and Gur Yaari. 2022. “T Cell Receptor Beta Germline Variability Is Revealed by Inference from Repertoire Data.” Genome Medicine 14 (1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13073-021-01008-4 Rodriguez, Oscar L., Catherine A. Silver, Kaitlyn Shields, Melissa L. Smith, and Corey T. Watson. 2022. “Targeted Long-Read Sequencing Facilitates Phased Diploid Assembly and Genotyping of the Human T Cell Receptor Alpha, Delta, and Beta Loci.” Cell Genomics 2 (12): 100228. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.xgen.2022.100228  Tools mentioned TIgGER (Immcantation) https://tigger.readthedocs.io/en/stable IgDiscover https://github.com/NBISweden/IgDiscover Partis https://github.com/psathyrella/partis MiXCR https://mixcr.com
On AIRR 14: Data protection and data sharing with Alexander Bernier
Aug 6 2023
On AIRR 14: Data protection and data sharing with Alexander Bernier
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 in different countries, and possible strategies to ensure data privacy. The episode is hosted by Dr. Ulrik Stervbo and Dr. Zhaoqing Ding. Comments are welcome to the inbox of onairr@airr-community.org  or on social media under the tag #onAIRR. Further information can be found here: https://www.antibodysociety.org/the-airr-community/airr-c-podcast.
On AIRR 13: Disease diagnostics using machine learning with Maxim Zaslavsky and Dr. Scott D. Boyd
Jul 2 2023
On AIRR 13: Disease diagnostics using machine learning with Maxim Zaslavsky and Dr. Scott D. Boyd
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 infection and vaccination. We discuss the preprint “Disease diagnostics using machine learning of immune receptors”, available at BioRxiv: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.04.26.489314. The work is led by Maxim Zaslavsky with Scott Boyd the corresponding author. In the manuscript, the authors demonstrate how AIRR-seq and machine learning can be used in disease diagnostics. The episode is hosted by Dr. Ulrik Stervbo and Dr. Zhaoqing Ding. Comments are welcome to the inbox of onairr@airr-community.org  or on social media under the tag #onAIRR. Further information can be found here: https://www.antibodysociety.org/the-airr-community/airr-c-podcast.
On AIRR 12: T-cell receptor-mimetic antibodies and immunoinformatics with Prof. Dr. Charlotte Deane
May 30 2023
On AIRR 12: T-cell receptor-mimetic antibodies and immunoinformatics with Prof. Dr. Charlotte Deane
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 discovery pipelines. We discuss the relevance of including protein structure to study and design antibodies, and the availability of such data.  The episode is hosted by Dr. Ulrik Stervbo and Dr. Zhaoqing Ding. Comments are welcome to the inbox of onairr@airr-community.org or on social media under the tag #onAIRR. Further information can be found here: https://www.antibodysociety.org/the-airr-community/airr-c-podcast.
On AIRR 11: Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) with Dr. Xenophon Papademetris
Apr 25 2023
On AIRR 11: Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) with Dr. Xenophon Papademetris
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 experience in the medical image field to design a high level route map for an imaginary company bringing to the market software to diagnose minimal residual disease. You can learn more about Medical Software development in Dr. Papademetris’s book Introduction to Medical Software: Foundations for Digital Health, Devices and Diagnostics (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and the Yale/Coursera class Introduction to Medical Software. The episode is hosted by Dr. Ulrik Stervbo and Dr. Zhaoqing Ding. Comments are welcome to the inbox of onairr@airr-community.org or on social media under the tag #onAIRR. Further information can be found here: https://www.antibodysociety.org/the-airr-community/airr-c-podcast
On AIRR 10: Characterising B Cell Lymphomas or Profiting from a Focus on B Cells in Health and in Disease with Dr. Ralf Küppers
Dec 29 2022
On AIRR 10: Characterising B Cell Lymphomas or Profiting from a Focus on B Cells in Health and in Disease with Dr. Ralf Küppers
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 Hodgkin lymphoma and the V-gene usage and mutations in CLL as prognostic indicators before talking about tracking pathogenic clones when surveying for relapse during clinical follow up.  The episode is hosted by Dr. Ulrik Stervbo and Dr. Zhaoqing Ding. Comments are welcome to the inbox of onairr@airr-community.org or on social media under the tag #onAIRR. Further information can be found here: https://www.antibodysociety.org/the-airr-community/airr-c-podcast.
On AIRR 9: The ImmunoMind or wielding an AI for repertoire insights with Vadim Nazarov
Nov 29 2022
On AIRR 9: The ImmunoMind or wielding an AI for repertoire insights with Vadim Nazarov
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 hosted by Dr. Ulrik Stervbo and Dr. Zhaoqing Ding. Comments are welcome to 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
On AIRR 8: Engineering B cells or Giving the immune System an Optimal Starting Point with Dr. Adi Barzel
Oct 7 2022
On AIRR 8: Engineering B cells or Giving the immune System an Optimal Starting Point with Dr. Adi Barzel
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 antibodies in mice” (Nat Biotechnol.; 2022; https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-022-01328-9). We also briefly touch on a second paper on some of the problems with CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing (“Frequent aneuploidy in primary human T cells after CRISPR-Cas9 cleavage”;  Nat Biotechnol.; 2022; https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-022-01377-0) iReceptor Plus Seminar Series - Nur-Taz Rahman from 10x Genomics and Kazuyoshi Ishigaki, Laboratory for Human Immunogenetics, RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences, Japan will present on October 27th (https://www.ireceptor-plus.com/news-and-events/seminars/) The episode is hosted by Dr. Ulrik Stervbo and Dr. Zhaoqing Ding.Comments are welcome to 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
On AIRR 7: Quality Controls in AIRR-Seq Assays or Handling the Catastrophe with Dr. Encarnita Mariotti-Ferrandiz
Sep 2 2022
On AIRR 7: Quality Controls in AIRR-Seq Assays or Handling the Catastrophe with Dr. Encarnita Mariotti-Ferrandiz
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://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-020-0656-3) and “Biological controls for standardisation and interpretation of adaptive immune receptor repertoire profiling” (eLife; 2021;  https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.66274). iReceptor Plus Seminar Series - Xiaole Shirley Liu from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Jeff Ruffolo from Johns Hopkins University will present on September 22, 2022: https://www.ireceptor-plus.com/news-and-events/seminars  The episode is hosted by Dr. Ulrik Stervbo and Dr. Zhaoqing Ding. Comments are welcome to 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
On AIRR 6: Data Sharing or Finding Glory, Fame and a Big Pile of Gold with Dr. Brian Corrie and Dr. Scott Christley
Jul 26 2022
On AIRR 6: Data Sharing or Finding Glory, Fame and a Big Pile of Gold with Dr. Brian Corrie and Dr. Scott Christley
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://vdjserver.org). In this episode we discuss possibilities for sharing AIRR-Seq data - repositories and metadata standards describing the samples and experimental process. We discuss AIRR Standards (https://docs.airr-community.org/en/stable) which includes MiAIRR Standard for dataset metadata and AIRR Data Commons, which is an API to query and download data from AIRR-Seq repositories. Complete and proper data annotation will bring fame and glory. iReceptor Plus Seminar Series - Ning Jiang from University of Pennsylvania, USA presents on July 28th: https://www.ireceptor-plus.com/news-and-events/seminars The episode is hosted by Dr. Ulrik Stervbo and Dr. Zhaoqing Ding. Comments are welcome to 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
On AIRR 5: Machine learning and AIRR or Looking for the needle in a needle stack with Dr. Lindsay Cowell and Dr. Victor Greiff
May 30 2022
On AIRR 5: Machine learning and AIRR or Looking for the needle in a needle stack with Dr. Lindsay Cowell and Dr. Victor Greiff
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 Informatics Division in the Department of Clinical Sciences, UT Southwestern, USA and Dr. Greiff heads  the Laboratory for Computational and Systems Immunology at the Department of Immunology of University of Oslo, Norway. The episode is hosted by Dr. Ulrik Stervbo and Dr. Zhaoqing Ding. Comments are welcome to 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
On AIRR 4: Understanding and engineering immune repertoires with Dr. Jacob Glanville
May 1 2022
On AIRR 4: Understanding and engineering immune repertoires with Dr. Jacob Glanville
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 Meeting VI: “Exploring New Frontiers”: https://www.antibodysociety.org/the-airr-community/meetings/airr-community-meeting-vi-exploring-new-frontiers iReceptor+ Seminar Series: http://www.ireceptor-plus.com/news-and-events/seminars Comments are welcome to 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
On AIRR 3: Outlining chronic lymphocytic leukemia with Dr. Anton Langerak
Mar 29 2022
On AIRR 3: Outlining chronic lymphocytic leukemia with Dr. Anton Langerak
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 cell receptors in CLL. AIRR Community Meeting VI: “Exploring New Frontiers”: https://www.antibodysociety.org/the-airr-community/meetings/airr-community-meeting-vi-exploring-new-frontiers 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
On AIRR 2: Establishing an AIRR-Seq framework with Dr. Lindsay Cowell
Feb 28 2022
On AIRR 2: Establishing an AIRR-Seq framework with Dr. Lindsay Cowell
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/
On AIRR 1: MRD with Dr. Luning Prak
Jan 24 2022
On AIRR 1: MRD with Dr. Luning Prak
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: https://www.antibodysociety.org/the-airr-community/airr-c-podcast/