I recorded the interviews on the subject with national experts from UAB, Harvard, Stanford and the NIH at a recent symposium organized by the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology and leading medical journal Nature Immunology. The symposium was sponsored in part by UAB and its Center for Clinical and Translational Science.
Our guest for this podcast is meeting presenter Stephen Quake, D.Phil., professor in the Department of Bioengineering at Stanford and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. Quake specializes in microfluidic large-scale integration (LSI), in which he use his "lab on a chip" (a fluid-containing maze of channels, valves and wells on a microchip) to achieve high-speed, automated analysis of biological problems.
Our discussion covered how, by coming up with technologies that more precisely measure biological processes, the field has revealed new laws of nature at work in the body.
Show notes from the interview
:49 Immunogenomics, says Quake, can be defined as the sequencing and study of genes involved in the performance of the human immune system — genes whose expression pattern is in constant flux.
1:45 Right now you can't go to the doctor and ask him or her to give you a molecular diagnostic test measuring the health of your immune system, but such tests may be coming with the help of immunogenomics. In the future, such tests may be used in combination with therapies that adjust your immune response when it's too sensitive (autoimmune disease) or too weak (vulnerable to infectious disease).
2:52 Technology development is part and parcel with advances in immunogenomics. Quake's original training was in physics, with its 300-year tradition of precision measurement, which helped him to develop new measurement technologies for biological systems.
3:12 Biology was revolutionized time and time again in the 20th century by new technologies, from chromatography in the early part of the century to gene sequencing and genomic technologies in the latter half.
4:20 High-speed testing, or high-throughput technologies, have allowed for complex, massive experiments that could never have been conceived before their advent. The modern era is characterized by continual leaps in computing power, and that same type of technological scaling has now moved into the analysis of genomic information.
5:34 Computing power helps to resolve the complexity of the human immune system (now recognized as more complex than originally understood) and to pursue simple ideas.
5:59 The field of immunogenomics is young, perhaps starting with a zebrafish model paper out of Quake's lab in 2009. His early work in immunogenomics was focused on answering basic questions about the immune system, such as how many antibodies the human body contains.
7:13 The next big milestones in the field will include figuring out how to intrepret immunogenomic data in the context of a given event, like getting vaccinated or contracting an infectious disease. Lots of labs are working in this area, and it will be exciting as they reach their conclusions.
8:22 Immunogenomics is still focused on basic questions about how to measure the immune system with genomics tools. It will be some time before the field can launch an immune version of the Human Genome Project (the Human Immunogenome Project?).
9:03 With the field being so new, there our no textbooks on it nor are there yet review papers to recommend, although some are being written right now. For those with a deep interest, says Quake, the best course may be to search the literature by keyword using PubMed, and he invites all to look up his papers, which are listed by topic at his website.
About the podcaster:
Greg Williams @gregscience @themixuab is research editor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Greg Williams @gregscience @themixuab is research editor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Tune in next Friday, when we will talk with symposium presenter Casey Weaver, M.D., professor in the Department of Pathology with the UAB School of Medicine.
Our discussion covered how, by coming up with technologies that more precisely measure biological processes, the field has revealed new laws of nature at work in the body.
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