Human Immune Monitoring Comes of Age

About this Class

Speaker: Shai Shen-Orr, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Israel Institute of Technology Registration Recent technological advances allow us to probe the immune system at high resolution and explore its variation between individuals. Yet the question remains how we move from a ‘data dump’ to a mechanistic model that we can allow to intelligently reason on system-level effects of perturbations. Here, I will describe the ‘data-insight gap’ namely, that is, why we repeatedly do not get the bang for the buck from the data we generate. I will describe our ongoing efforts to build a system level cell-centered view of ‘omic’ data over time, and its integration with knowledge in the primary immunology literature. Data and knowledge put together in this cell-centered framework establish a means to 'connect the dots' across immunology as well as systematic de novo hypotheses generation. Biography: - Associate Professor, Faculty of Medicine at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. - Since 2012, heads the Systems Immunology & Precision Medicine Lab, which develops novel analytics for studying the immune system. Tools are applied to study the drivers of immune variation and to further immune-based Precision Medicine. - BSc, Technion in Information Systems (1999); MSc, Bioinformatics at the Weizmann Institute of Science (2002); PhD, Harvard University in Biochemistry (2007); postdoctoral studies at Stanford University. - Research has been cited numerous times and featured in systems biology textbooks for students. - Research has laid the foundation of CytoReason, a company building a cell-centered ML model of the immune-system, which it applies to further drug development in collaboration with leading pharma companies. Individuals with disabilities who need Sign Language Interpreters and/or reasonable accommodation to participate in this event should contact Prisca N. Fall, fallpn@mail.nih.gov, 301-402-4582, and/or the Federal Relay (1-800-877-8339).