Immune Repertoire Sequencing Is Used For Studying Immune-Mediated Diseases, Immunotherapy And Identifying Novel Therapeutic Targets

 

Immune Repertoire Sequencing

Immune repertoire sequencing is a genomic technique that provides an unparalleled overview of an individual’s adaptive B cell immune repertoire. It is a powerful tool for the study of immune-mediated diseases, immunotherapy and identifying novel therapeutic targets.

 Immune repertoire sequencing utilizes next generation sequencing (NGS) to amplify and sequence the complementarity-determining regions of B cell receptors (BCRs) and T cell receptors (TCRs). It also measures the frequency of shared V(D)J sequences that distinguish a particular set of B cells, called a clonal group. The sequences are clustered using algorithms from machine learning and statistics, and the resulting clonal groups can be used to infer dynamic population structure.

The global immune repertoire sequencing market size was valued at US$ 114.3 million in 2017, and is expected to witness a CAGR of 5.6% over the forecast period (2018 – 2026).

This is particularly important as a result of the fact that B cells undergo clonal expansion and affinity maturation, which can shift the reactivity of a given repertoire and/or increase the number of antigen-reactive B cells in a sample.

In the field of genomics, high-throughput sequencing has become widely used for profiling genomes, transcriptomes and epigenomes. The rapidly improving technology now makes it possible to profile a variety of biological systems in unprecedented detail. However, interpreting the results from these genomic tools is challenging and requires specialized computational methods.

The immune system is a complex network of lymphocytes that recognizes and responds to a wide range of antigens. Each lymphocyte expresses a practically unique combination of antigen-receptor genes encoded by a fixed number of gene segments. The combination of these segments, encoded by the V(D)J recombination process during cellular development, defines an individual’s adaptive immune repertoire and determines the specificity of that repertoire to different antigens.

Immune Repertoire Sequencing are highly diverse, and the ability to quantify this diversity in human individuals is critical for understanding the role of different repertoires in health and disease. It is necessary to identify the underlying genetic variations that drive the variation in the repertoire. This requires high-throughput sequencing of large populations of cells and sophisticated computational analysis.

Diversity measurements have been widely used in ecology and genomics to characterize biodiversity, and they are often applied to estimate immune repertoire diversity in clinical settings. However, many of these measures are sensitive to sampling issues and can be biased by the distribution of clonal groups in a sampled population.

The Element AVITI System, was launched by the Element Biosciences in March 2022. The company claims that Element’s unique short-read sequencing chemistry will offer high accuracy and cost-effectiveness.