Many of us think about our immune system only when it’s not doing its job. But for the researchers at the La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology, that’s all they do. They work to understand why it gets out of whack—like when it fails to kill cancerous cells or overreacts and causes asthma, allergies, or autoimmune disorders—harness its power so it can better fend off harmful conditions, and help other researchers do the same.
When scientists and drug companies seek to develop a new treatment or vaccine, one of the first places they turn is a database built by LJI. In that database is a multitude of catalogued research from various sources on epitopes, the specific part of a bacterium, virus, disease, or allergen that triggers an immune response and can potentially be used as a vaccine target. “We haven’t discovered all the epitopes that are out there—and we won’t—but if you discover enough of them, you start to understand why the immune system does or doesn’t do what it’s supposed to,” says Stephen Wilson, LJI’s chief operating officer and chief technology officer.
LJI’s National Institutes of Health–funded Immune Epitope Database uses neural networks similar to artificial intelligence to find commonalities and disparate pieces of data about experiments that found an epitope. “It’s a little esoteric if you’re not an immunologist, but if you are, it’s the Library of Congress times a trillion,” Wilson says. The IEDB has accumulated enough data for scientists to base fairly accurate predictions on, and do experiments that weren’t possible before. “Some science is small, focused, and based on a hypothesis,” he says. “Some science is based on getting all of the hypotheses, all of the data, and putting it into a place where people can come in and ask new questions using data that already exists instead of starting over.”
Although the IEDB does contain information on a class of potentially weaponizable bacteria, you’d have to get pretty creative to make it dangerous. “If somebody said ‘I’m going to use the IEDB to create a superbug,’ they’d be woefully disappointed, because what we’d show you is all the different ways your immune system is going to attack it.”
Tags: Database, Innovation, La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology, LJI, Medical Research, Tip Sheet
