Big Data Tool to Reveal Immune System Role in Diseases

Researchers from the Genomics group of the Simons Center for Data Analysis, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Princeton University have designed a new online tool that predicts the role of key proteins and genes in diseases of the human immune system. Details of the resource, called “ImmuNet,” were published September 15 in the journal Immunity.

The publicly available tool uses information compiled from 38,088 public experiments to predict new immune pathway interactions, mechanisms and disease-associated genes. With advances in inexpensive computing power to search vast stores of data, researchers are now able to combine algorithms and models into tools such as ImmuNet that pull previously unrecognized disease patterns from databases. These computational patterns are predictive, and researchers can test them with further experiments.

Read the Science Daily story here >>

Read the Immunity paper here >>