NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – The newly launched iReceptor Plus Consortium has received a total of €8.4 million ($9.6 million) in awards from the European Union and the Canadian government to promote integration and sharing of human immunological data. Recipients said the funding would help researchers advance understanding of immune responses and lead to new therapeutic targets.
The four-year award will support development of a technology platform to integrate distributed repositories of Adaptive Immune Receptor Repertoire sequencing (AIRR-seq) data, which participants said would enable precision medicine and immunotherapy in cancer, inflammatory and autoimmune diseases, allergies, and infectious diseases.
"We will offer a totally new class of biomarkers to support novel treatments," iReceptor Plus Coordinator Gur Yaari, of Bar-Ilan University in Israel, said in a statement.
"Most AIRR-seq data is currently stored and curated by individual labs using a variety of tools and technologies," Yaari explained. "The platform will lower the barrier to access and analyze large AIRR-seq datasets which will ease the availability of this important data to academia, industry, and clinical partners."
The iReceptor Plus Consortium, made up of more than 20 entities from nine countries, is holding its initial conference this week in Eilat, Israel.