Research talk: Learning to read the adaptive immune systems of humans

Speaker: Jabran Zahid, Researcher, Microsoft Health Futures

Humans’ adaptive immune system has evolved over hundreds of millions of years to recognize and destroy invading pathogens and retain an immunological memory to protect against future invasions. T cells are a key component of the adaptive immune system. T cells bind to pathogens via receptors on their cell surface and are critical for recognizing and destroying viruses and bacteria. From a single vial of donor blood, we can genetically sequence the receptors of hundreds of thousands of T cells—a small subset of the billions of T cells floating around in our bodies. These genetic sequences encode the immune history of the donor, including any active diseases. To date, we have genetically sequenced the T cell receptors of about 50,000 donors, yielding billions of unique T cells receptors. In this talk, learn about our bold collaboration with Adaptive Biotechnologies in using these genetic sequences for diagnosing disease and ultimately learning how to read the immune history of individuals.