Defining molecular immune response signatures in peripheral blood CD4+ cells from healthy individuals

This project sets out to define molecular immune response signatures (MIRS), containing genes expressed at levels that are longitudinally stable within individuals and differential among individuals, in CD4+ cells from healthy individuals. We have generated both baseline and stimulation response MIRS gene sets and used them to identify immune phenotypic groupings pre- and post-CD4+ cell stimulation, respectively, in two independent healthy human cohorts with two major goals in mind: to determine whether pre-stimulation phenotypic groupings can forecast phenotypic groupings that form in response to stimulation and to test the capacity of the MIRS concept to robustly identify corresponding baseline phenotypic groupings across cohorts. A multitude of baseline immune phenotypic groupings can be defined using baseline MIRS gene sets, raising the potential that the MIRS platform could serve as a biomarker discovery tool for a range of immune modulatory therapies.