Singapore: With the entire world on a war footing with the spread of the novel coronavirus, Scientists from the SingHealth Duke-NUS Academic Medical Centre (AMC) have developed an interactive web-based atlas of the human immunome or genes and proteins that make up the immune system.
The atlas, known as EPIC (Extended Polydimensional Immunome Characterisation), hosts a comprehensive, expanding immune cell database ranging from cord blood to adult stages, and can be used by the scientific community worldwide to study the mechanisms of immunity.
EPIC will play a role in augmenting or deepening these studies by providing a construct of the immune map and using artificial intelligence (AI) to stratify and analyse data sets, which scientists can access freely.
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Professor Salvatore Albani, Director of the SingHealth Duke-NUS Translational Immunology Institute and principal investigator of the study, said, "The study of the human immunome is akin to taking an MRI of the human body at the cellular level, enabling us to pinpoint what is right or wrong and what we can do to tackle the disease. We hope that EPIC, used as a comprehensive dataset and analytical tool of the human immunome, will be able to help clinicians and scientists understand the mechanisms of immunity, predict clinical responses for precision medicine, and even play a part in identifying new vaccines and therapies."
"When developing vaccines, scientists look at immune signatures that can predict the body’s responsiveness to potential vaccines. EPIC can help to identify these signatures much faster, and accelerate the process of vaccine development," Prof Albani added.
EPIC could also speed up the process of finding vaccines. EPIC is currently used by clinician-scientists and researchers to understand diseases such as arthritis, liver cancer and immunological deficiencies.
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Dr Yeo Joo Guan, Consultant, Division of Medicine, KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital has been using EPIC to identify potential therapeutic targets and immune signatures associated with poorer clinical outcomes in auto-immune diseases such as Systemic Lupus Erythematosus.
"EPIC is very useful to clinician-scientists who use immunological data for their research as it provides a large healthy cytometry dataset and the right tools to analyse them. Its built-in bio-informatics mechanisms allow for the data to be readily interrogated, even by researchers with a little computational background. Another uniqueness of EPIC is its dynamic and interactive format of data presentation which enables researchers to look at data from different perspectives whenever new ideas arise," Dr Yeo said.
It is to be noted that EPIC initially started out with only Asian phenotypes but has expanded over time to include immune cell datasets from regional and international sources, including the European Union and the United States.
It is designed as an open-source tool that is accessible to all researchers, which in turn, allows anyone to contribute samples, data and new analysis tools.
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