Decoding the immune repertoire for health and disease.
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Decoding the immune repertoire for health and disease: Development of a single-cell, alpha-beta paired TCR database from healthy adults for use as a comparator for immune repertoires in disease.
IRAS ID
308371
Contact name
Mathew Jones
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Etcembly
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 8 months, 1 days
Research summary
Etcembly is building the world's largest health and disease database. This can be used to identify the unique signatures a particular disease might leave on a patient's immune system or immune repertoire. To determine which signatures are disease related it is necessary to understand what the repertoire of a healthy individual looks like. This study aims to recruit healthy individuals and sequence the part of the genome responsible for targeting foreign bodies (the T-cell receptor) capable of causing disease.
By better understanding and cataloguing this immune repertoire, as it is known, researchers globally will be able to identify novel therapies with which they can fight a host of diseases. The successful completion of this study will have implications across a number fields a key driver for Etcembly however, is the design of immunotherapies targeting cancer. Cancer remains a leading cause of death globally, accounting for 10 million deaths in 2020. This study aims to improve cancer survival rates by both characterising the extent to which a person's T-cell receptor repertoire can influence their prognosis and using the database to predict TCRs capable of targeting cancer cells.
Participants will be recruited on the condition that they are between 18-65 years of age and capable of providing informed consent.
The study will be conducted at a UKRI research facility in Harwell, Oxfordshire. The site is well equipped for the research being proposed and will likely not require off-site transport of samples.
The study is open ended with each participant attending 5 times over the course of one year at 3-month intervals. At each visit the participant will be asked to fill in a health questionnaire and 50mls of blood will be drawn.REC name
Yorkshire & The Humber - Sheffield Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
22/YH/0029
Date of REC Opinion
23 Feb 2022
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion