January 2024
-Inno4Vac Subtopic 1 (VAXPRED), which is dedicated to building an open access and cloud-based platform to predict vaccine efficacy using artificial intelligence, has recently published the article entitled “Benchmarking and integrating human B-cell receptor genomic and antibody proteomic profiling”. It was authored by Prof Victor Greiff and his team at the University of Oslo and is currently available as a preprint on the server bioRxiv (Benchmarking and integrating human B-cell receptor genomic and antibody proteomic profiling | bioRxiv).
The article highlights the importance of characterising the B-cell receptor and antibody repertoire in understanding human adaptive immunity. Immunoglobulins (Ig), which exist either as B-cell receptors (BCR) on the surface of B cells or as antibodies when secreted, play a key role in the recognition and response to antigenic threats. The capability to jointly characterise the BCR and antibody repertoire is crucial in understanding human adaptive immunity.
The study combines different technologies, using bulk BCR sequencing, single-cell BCR (scBCR) sequencing, and antibody peptide sequencing by tandem mass spectrometry (Ab-seq) and represents one of the few studies in which these three methods overlap and complement each other to decipher human adaptive immunity. Specifically, the authors demonstrate the feasibility of combining scBCR-seq and Ab-seq for reconstructing paired-chain Ig sequences from the serum antibody repertoire. Understanding paired-chain Ig sequence diversity is crucial for next-generation vaccine response profiling.
This authors’ work could serve as a proof-of-principle for combining bulk sequencing, single-cell sequencing, and mass spectrometry as complementary methods towards capturing human humoral immunity in its entirety.
The results obtained from this study are promising and could lead to significant advancements in the field of vaccine efficacy prediction.
Contact:
Dr. Irina Meln (Project and Innovation Manager at the European Vaccine Initiative)
Email: irina.meln@euvaccine.eu
Dr. Luisa Borgianni (Project Manager, Sclavo Vaccines Association)
Email: borgianni@sclavo.org
This project has received funding from the Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 Joint Undertaking under grant agreement No 101007799 (Inno4Vac). This Joint Undertaking receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and EFPIA (www.imi.europa.eu). This communication reflects the author´s view and neither IMI nor the European Union, EFPIA, or any Associated Partners are responsible for any use that may be made of the information contained herein.