The journal Nature Biotechnology reported yesterday on an innovative technology that will provide the scientific community with innovative tools for a good understanding of the activity of the immune system. The technology developed at the Technion maps, based on a scan of millions of scientific articles, the immune profile of each disease. These maps, which have already revealed previously unknown biological interactions, will allow the development of personalized treatments based on understanding the immune system
Technology developed at the Technion will provide the scientific community with innovative tools for an in-depth understanding of the immune system in health and disease. The research published in the journal Nature Biotechnology was led by doctoral student Ksenia Kevlar under the guidance of Associate Professor Shai Shen-Or from the Rapaport Faculty of Medicine.
In the modern era, medicine has advanced at breakneck speed, and there is no dispute about that; Life expectancy doubled between the middle of the 19th century and the end of the 20th century, vaccines dramatically reduced the mortality rates among infants and children, and in the last two decades, breakthrough technologies in the immune system have entered medical practice - technologies that significantly improve our ability to treat diseases, especially cancer, By manipulating the immune system.
However, the immune system is a very complex entity, so analyzing and targeting it is a complicated challenge. In the last decade, the scientific community has developed innovative tools for accurate measurement of the various parameters of the immune system. These tools provide us with enormous information, so the current challenge, which the article focuses on, is the analysis of that information. According to Associate Professor Shen-Or, "Researchers and doctors, however experienced and excellent they may be, specialize in a narrow angle of the medical complex. Being human, they cannot have a systematic view based on millions of studies and articles, what's more, the rate of scientific publications in the field of vaccination is tremendous: a new article every half hour. But what the human doctor and researcher are unable to do, we now offer through immuneXpresso: building a computerized model of the immune system. This model gives us for the first time a fascinating view of the system as a whole, a better understanding of existing knowledge and its limitations, automation of data interpretation and systematic creation of new hypotheses."
The researchers developed a language processing system that scans all the scientific literature in the life sciences and creates, based on this information, a global picture of the network of interactions between the cells of the immune system in the human body. This is in high resolution and with reference to thousands of diseases. The system developed at the Technion is a dramatic step towards an immune-centric view of diseases. According to Associate Professor Shen-Or, "The immune system plays a critical role in fighting diseases and maintaining our health. It is a kind of sensing system that monitors the external and internal environment and reacts to the changes that apply to it. The problem is that it sometimes fails or creates harmful interactions with other cells in the body. Therefore, in order to optimize medical treatment, we must open the black box of the immune system and understand how it works."
This is where immuneXpresso comes into play. This software scans millions of articles in the PubMed database - 16 million so far. The research focuses on molecules called "cytokines" - the communication proteins that allow the cells of the immune system to send messages between cells and between tissues through the bloodstream. Using the new technology, the researchers created a detailed computerized map of connections between 340 types of cells and 140 types of cytokines in thousands of diseases - a knowledge base that is the first of its kind and unprecedented in terms of scope and resolution. This move provides a global characterization of the network of intercellular interactions in the immune system and of patterns of accumulation of scientific knowledge over time. Alongside the analysis and mapping of known factors, the analytical approach described in the article enabled the prediction of hundreds of new biological interactions that had not been identified or published until now. Furthermore, for the first time in history, the researchers mapped the immune profiles of various diseases and managed to group the diseases according to similarities between "disease maps" that show the connections between a medical condition and the immune condition. These "disease clusters" constitute a unique road map for orientation to deficiencies in the functions of the immune system in various disease states. This achievement will make it possible to designate existing drug treatments for additional diseases that those treatments can prevent or slow down.
According to Associate Professor Shen-Or, "In order to translate this information into personalized medicine, in the future we will connect it to the immune profile of the specific patient. This is with the understanding that the immune system changes from person to person and even within the same person over time. Therefore, if we only know how to monitor this system, as we currently monitor, for example, the activity of the heart, we will be able to carry out a personalized, accurate and data-based medical intervention."
Already more than a decade ago, in his post-doctorate at Stanford, Prof. Mishna Shen-Or studied the variation in the immune system of different people. "This was the first time I analyzed data obtained from monitoring immune systems, and I discovered differences in the function of 8 cytokines in an elderly person compared to an old person. I shared this discovery with experienced immunologists in the hope that they would help me understand which cells secrete these cytokines, but none of them could give me an answer. This is because every immunologist sees a partial picture of the system and none of them knows it fully. From then until today I focus on building a systemic picture of the immune system and its interactions with the other systems in the body. This is out of an aspiration to turn immunology - the theory of the immune system - into a structured and model-based science, that is, into real systemic immunology."
Systemic immunology was born in about a decade and has made a lot of progress in our ability to measure the system in humans and generate a lot of data. However, the complementary aspect - the interpretation of the data - has not developed at a similar pace. Associate Prof. Mishna Shen-Or estimates that immuneXpresso will give a significant boost to the interpretive aspect, partly because it is a platform for mapping and standardizing the existing knowledge, enabling a connection between scientific literature and experimental data.
Prof. Mishna Shen-Or's laboratory is an interdisciplinary space that brings together researchers from a computational background with researchers from a biological background. He himself embodies the combination of different fields: he completed a bachelor's degree in information systems at the Technion in the faculties of industry and management and computer science; At the Weizmann Institute, a master's degree in bioinformatics - use of databases and computational tools for the benefit of biological and medical research; Harvard PhD in developmental biology; and at Stanford a post-doctorate in bioinformatics and immunology. In 2011, he returned to the Technion as a faculty member at the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine, and here he heads the Laboratory for Systemic Immunology and Personalized Medicine.
The research was conducted with funding from the American Health Authorities (NIH) and many years of work were invested in it. The commercial development of immuneXpresso technology continues today within the CytoReason company, which works to produce a systemic insight of the immune system for the benefit of developing drugs and more precise medicine.
4 תגובות
Hello! I'm 62 years old, in the tests that I did twice recently, it appears that my body is "exposed" and that the immune system in my body does not exist, which means that all the indicators are very low and even outside the normal range, I would like to know what could be the cause and what does this indicate?
Every wisdom in the world is valued according to the value of the purpose it brings
As a former "Aradnik", I remember that people with asthma would come to the city. Why? Because it was once thought that humid air causes respiratory attacks. Since then, many hypotheses have been raised regarding the causes of the disease, starting with diet, air temperature, air humidity and ending with hormonal changes and genetic factors.
Until British researchers discovered that calcium receptors are the cause of the severe allergic reaction. And these receptors may be affected by environmental factors (humidity, soot, pollution, etc.).
This breakthrough meant that within a few years a new drug should join our medicine cabinet.
So why all this tedious introduction?
To show all our development we try to find answers to different questions.
Starting with the milk yield in the cow, continue with sheep reproduction to our most existential questions.
Starting with philosophy that talked about theoretical terms, through psychology and physiology until we reach those roots from which the phenomena in this world occur.
So what's new?
The new thing is that beyond the roots we discover in this world, there are additional roots above them which are the source of those roots we discover in this world.
And how will we discover those roots that I call "the source of the roots in this world"?
Answer: For this we will discover that we need to change ourselves, to create within ourselves an instrument, a tool that will have the ability for this.
And this is the discovery that will take place in the 21st century?
Answer: If until now we have developed external tools (microscopes, amplifiers, etc.) that have allowed us to study different objects, we will reach a place where in order to discover new phenomena, we will have to develop internal tools to get to the root of those phenomena.
Every wisdom in the world is valued according to the value of the purpose it brings.
The same method that will allow us to change ourselves and calibrate ourselves according to those roots, which we can say is the most suitable for our generation.
Every wisdom in the world is valued according to the value of the purpose it brings
As a former Erdannik, I remember that people with asthma would come to town. Why? Because it was once thought that humid air causes respiratory attacks. Since then, many hypotheses have been raised regarding the causes of the disease, starting with diet, air temperature, air humidity and ending with hormonal changes and genetic factors.
Until British researchers discovered that calcium receptors are the cause of the severe allergic reaction. And these receptors may be affected by environmental factors (humidity, soot, pollution, etc.).
This breakthrough meant that within a few years a new drug should join our medicine cabinet.
So why all this tedious introduction?
To show all our development we try to find answers to different questions.
Starting with the milk yield in the cow, continue with sheep reproduction to our most existential questions.
Starting with philosophy that talked about theoretical terms, through psychology and physiology until we reach those roots from which phenomena in this world occur.
So what's new?
The new thing is that beyond the roots we discover in this world, there are additional roots above them which are the source of those roots we discover in this world.
And how will we discover those roots that I call "the source of the roots in this world"?
Answer: For this we will discover that we need to change ourselves, to create within ourselves an instrument, a tool that will have the ability for this.
And this is the discovery that will take place in the 21st century?
Answer: If until now we have developed external tools (microscopes, amplifiers, etc.) that have allowed us to study different objects, we will reach a place where in order to discover new phenomena, we will have to develop internal tools to get to the root of those phenomena.
Every wisdom in the world is valued according to the value of the purpose it brings.
The same method that will allow us to change ourselves and calibrate ourselves according to those roots, which we can say is the most suitable for our generation.
0 Indeed, there is much justice in the claim that the immune system must be strengthened. Prof. Selig Ashchar from the Weizmann Institute developed a method to increase the fighting of lymphocytes against certain cancer cells. The method has already saved leukemia patients who were in the Sufi Gospel.