With 9 new studies and 7 updated studies, the latest release of ImmPort contains shared data (ready for free re-use) from thousands of experimental samples. Research focus areas include vaccine response, allergy, asthma, and preterm birth. Assay types including ELISA, ELISPOT, RNA sequencing, flow cytometry, and many more. One new shared study, SDY1086, presented novel insights into how the gut microbiome impacts vaccine response in humans. Per the study summary published in Cell, researchers administered a seasonal influenza vaccine to a group of healthy adults who were given a course of broad-spectrum antibiotics, and also administered the vaccine to a control group of healthy adults not receiving antibiotics.

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How to Explore ImmPort Data Visually

Bringing data to life through visualization is a powerful tool for discovery, and the ImmPort team is proud to add this capability to the ImmPort user experience. In one quick glance, users can now explore data in bubble chart format by research focus area, and drill down to find datasets by assay type. Additionally, users can visualize other aspects of study data by clicking any numbers with a pie chart icon at the top of the Shared Data homepage.

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What can the Immune Epitope Database (IEDB) do for your research? With over two million experiments and hundreds of thousands of epitopes stored, the IEDB provides an invaluable free resource to researchers worldwide. Dr. Bjoern Peters, PhD and co-leader of the IEDB and Professor for the La Jolla Institute of Allergy and Immunology, gave an information-packed talk during FOCIS on the wealth of information within the IEDB. The IEDB is one of the world’s largest catalogues of epitopes, which are the specific molecular structures used by the immune system to recognize unwanted visitors such as viruses and bacteria.

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With the advances in high parameter single cell technologies such as flow cytometry and CyTOF, researchers now have access to a staggering amount of data at the individual cellular level. This data can provide critical insight into immune function, revealing clues to underlying disease mechanisms and even predict patient response to treatment. During FOCIS 2019, Dr. Pratip K. Chattopadhyay, PhD gave an innovative talk on how high parameter flow cytometry and a new computational platform have been able to predict metastatic melanoma outcomes and patient response to specific immunotherapies using only a blood sample.

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Preterm birth, or delivery of an infant prior to 37 weeks of gestation, is a significant cause of infant morbidity and mortality. Globally, over 15 million babies are delivered prematurely each year, and over 1 million infant deaths annually are attributed to complications related to preterm birth. March of Dimes and its research partners are working tirelessly to change those statistics. In the past, usage of big data has been limited in the field of preterm birth research.

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ImmPort team members, @ImmPortDB, and collaborators were thrilled to host a series of talks and a hands-on workshop during the 2019 Federation of Clinical Immunology Societies (FOCIS) Annual Meeting. The action packed session was chaired by ImmPort Scientific Program Director, Sanchita Bhattacharya, @SanchitaB, PhD and Bioinformatics Project Lead of the Bakar Institute of Computational Health Sciences, UCSF, and included several enlightening presentations from ImmPort collaborators and team members: Precision Immunology: How High Parameter Technology Can Shape Immunotherapy; Pratip K.

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The International Society for Advancement of Cytometry will hold its 34th annual congress in Vancouver, Canada on June 22-26, 2019. This distinguished event known as CYTO, features world renowned speakers, workshops, scientific tutorials, and technology showcases in the area of cytometry. ImmPort’s own Atul Butte, MD, PhD and Director of the Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute at UCSF, will be speaking on the topic of Translating a Trillion Points of Data into Therapies, Diagnostics, and New Insights into Immunology on June 23rd.

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In order to understand and study immune dysfunction, it is vital to understand how the immune system functions in healthy individuals. Dr. Sanchita Bhattacharya, ImmPort Scientific Program Director and Bioinformatics Project Leader at University of California San Francisco, presented on exactly this topic at the 7th International Molecular Diagnostics Europe conference in Lisbon, Portugal. Previously, immune assays had not been reproducibly characterized for a sufficiently large and diverse healthy human cohort.

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Our IEDB collaborators on the HIPC Standards Working Group are presenting a poster at AAI 2019 on the work we’ve done to represent immune exposures with ontologies when the description of study subjects is uploaded to ImmPort. Abstract ID: 905 Program Number: 130.26 () Abstract Title: Formal representation of immunology related data with ontologies Session Title: Technological Innovations I Date: Saturday, May 11, 2019 Time: 2:30 PM - 3:45 PM Room: Exhibit/Poster Hall

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Data Release 29 Highlight

Clinical Trials in Organ Transplantation (CTOT)ImmPort’s latest data release contains 20 shared studies, covering multiple assay types and focus areas. Three of the shared studies come from the Clinical Trials in Organ Transplantation (CTOT) and Clinical Trials in Organ Transplantation in Children (CTOT-C) programs. These vital programs are sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases division, and aim to “improve short and long-term graft and patient survival.

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