Approved Research

Longitudinal Immune Monitoring

Lay summary

The immune system has evolved to protect the body from infections, and is constantly engaged in fighting off the wide range of diseases which one encounters during everyday life. The immune system also plays an important part in determining the likelihood of a person suffering from non-infective medical conditions (such as cancer or heart disease), and how they may respond to treatment.  The state of a person's immune system response is therefore one indicator of that person's health, and monitoring it assists in the care and diagnosis of many clinical conditions.

Oxford Immune Algorithmics is a deep biotech company incubated by the University of Oxford which is creating an Artificially Intelligent (AI) algorithm to understand a patient's immune system response, based upon their individual data, and correlate how it relates to their health and medical conditions.  Since every individual is unique, understanding a personalised immune system response is an extremely complex task.  Once trained, however, the AI model would be able to make a personalised prediction on the basis of a commonly available blood test, allowing the delivery of therapy on a patient-by-patient basis, optimised for that individual.

This project aims to collect longitudinal health and blood test data, which will be used for the training and validation of the AI model.  The project is likely to last 1-2 years.  Once developed, the AI models will allow for triaging of patients, assessing therapeutic implementation and tracking of patient progress, with full consideration given to each patient's particular condition and health status.