ImmuneSpace: Enabling integrative modeling of human immunological data

Raphael Gottardo, VIDD

Thursday, February 25 at 11am in the Sze conference rooms

Recent technical advances have transformed the field of immunology. We are now capable of measuring features of immune responses, including B- and T-cell specificity and repertoire, serum and intracellular cytokines, and more, on a scale never imagined before. As a consequence, the generation of big data sets has become routine and there is an urgent need for an analysis platform to facilitate data exploration and integration across assays and studies. Here we present ImmuneSpace, the data repository and analysis platform of the Human Immunology Project Consortium (HIPC). The HIPC program, funded by the NIH, is a multi-center collaborative effort to characterize the status of the immune system in different populations under diverse stimulations and disease states. This ongoing effort has generated large amounts of varied high-throughput, high-dimensional biological data (flow cytometry, CyTOF, RNA-Seq, Luminex, among others). All data generated to date by HIPC, along with other selected datasets generated by other NIAID funded projects, have been made publicly available through ImmuneSpace and are ready to be explored using visualization and analysis tools built in ImmuneSpace. To this end, we hope that ImmuneSpace will act as a central immunological hub, allowing experimentalists, statisticians, and bioinformaticians to freely retrieve, explore and compare data across assays and across studies generated within and outside of HIPC.

ImmuneSpace is accessible at http://www.immunespace.org