Get funded to use ImmPort Data

Did you know NIAID funds researchers to develop new or improved ways to use ImmPort shared data? The Cooperative Agreement PAR-16-253, posted in May 2016, does just that. For those of you pondering the possibilities, a brief summary of the first and second round awardees follows.

2017
Dr. Steve Kleinstein’s team at Yale University is developing LinkedImm, a system designed to integrate ImmPort vaccine studies, linking those studies to other public resources such as pathway databases, gene ontology and publications, to support hypothesis-driven queries. This project doesn’t stop with development of LinkedImm – the team will be focusing their discovery efforts on identifying signatures of human influenza vaccine responses.

Dr. Shuzhao Li and his team from Emory University are developing the Multiscal, Multifactorial Immune Networks (MMIN) webservice as a means to integrate ImmPort study data across data types. MMIN will be applied to the investigation of heme biosynthesis in immune responses.

2018
Dr. Tim Mosmann‘s team at the University of Rochester proposed Integrating SWIFT Tools to Enhance Flow Data Analysis, Exploration and Visualization in ImmPort This proposal plans to make a suite of flow cytometry analysis tools, including the SWIFT clustering algorithm, easier to use by the scientific community. The suite will include preprocessing, clustering and analysis tools as well as SWIFT cluster templates that facilitate comparisons between flow cytometry experiments. There are many more features planned for this suite of tools, details can be found in NIH Reporter.

Dr. Max Qian from JCVI will be focusing his efforts on cytometry data from ImmPort vaccine studies. Innovative, unsupervised population identification combined with identification of cell-based biomarkers is just the beginning. The plan is to return the analysis results to ImmPort to be shared with software tools as well as semantic assertions of the biomarkers. More details can be found in NIH Reporter.