Observant readers may have noted my recent absence over the past few weeks. I’ve been working on recovering from a recent illness.
This led me to consider the immune system and how little I understand about my own immune status. The intricate network of cells, proteins, and biomolecules that protects us from illness is astonishingly complex. Immunologists are still working to comprehend its entire functioning.
For those of us who are not immunologists, the knowledge gap is even wider. I received my flu vaccine last week and have no insight into how my immune system reacted. Will it safeguard me from the flu virus this winter? Is it “overworked” due to the various pathogens it has encountered recently? And since my husband received his shot simultaneously, I can’t help but wonder how our responses might compare.
Consequently, I was intrigued by a new test under development aimed at assessing immune health. It even provides a score.
Writer David Ewing Duncan anticipated that the test would uncover more about his health than any previous tests he had taken. He shared his experience in a piece co-published by MIT Technology Review and Aventine.
The evaluation David underwent was developed by John Tsang at Yale University along with his team. Their goal was to establish a method for assessing how healthy an individual’s immune system might be.
This presents a significant challenge for several reasons. To begin with, defining “healthy” is tricky. I find it to be a somewhat vague notion that becomes more intricate upon further reflection. Certainly, we all have a general understanding of what being in good health entails. But does it merely mean the absence of illness? Is it centered on resilience? Might it involve the ability to endure the effects of aging?
Tsang and his team aimed to evaluate “deviation from health.” They examined blood samples from 228 individuals with immune disorders stemming from single-gene mutations, along with 42 healthy individuals. These subjects were assessed along a health continuum.
Another major hurdle involves capturing the immune system’s complexity, which entails countless proteins and cells interacting in diverse manners. (On a side note: Last year, MIT Technology Review recognized Ang Cui at Harvard University as one of our Innovators under 35 for her efforts to elucidate it all through machine learning. She created the Immune Dictionary to illustrate how hundreds of proteins influence immune cells—resembling a “periodic table” for the immune system.)
Tsang and his colleagues addressed this by conducting a range of tests on those blood samples. The extensive nature of these tests distinguishes them from standard blood tests you might receive at a doctor’s visit. The team analyzed how genes were expressed by blood cells, measuring various immune cells and over 1,300 proteins.
The team members employed machine learning to identify correlations between these assessments and health, enabling them to formulate an immune health score for each volunteer. They refer to it as the immune health metric, or IHM.
When they utilized this method to determine the immune scores of individuals who had previously participated in other studies, they found that the IHM appeared to be consistent with other health indicators, such as individual responses to illnesses, treatments, and vaccinations. This study was published in the journal Nature Medicine last year.
The researchers involved aspire for a test like this to eventually assist in identifying individuals at risk of cancer and other illnesses, or clarify why certain individuals respond differently to treatments or vaccinations.
However, the test is not yet ready for clinical application. If, like me, you find yourself eager to discover your own IHM, you’ll simply have to be patient.
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.
