Professor Dirk Aarts from Oxford’s Department of Chemistry is co-leading a new interdisciplinary research programme that will investigate how the human immune system changes as we age – and whether a person’s ‘immune age’ could one day help identify disease risk before symptoms appear.
The Oxford Martin Programme on Immune Ageing brings together researchers from chemistry, medicine and computational biology to build a detailed picture of how healthy immunity changes over a lifetime.
As we grow older, our immune systems change, leaving us more vulnerable to infections and cancer and reducing the effectiveness of vaccines. These changes also differ between men and women: women are more likely to develop autoimmune diseases, while men are more susceptible to some infections and cancers. Yet scientists still lack a detailed understanding of how healthy immunity changes over a lifetime, and what drives these differences.
At the heart of the programme is a new approach to studying the enormous variety of receptors used by immune cells to recognise threats.
Prof Aarts has an interdisciplinary research programme spanning soft and biological matter. Together with colleagues in Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Medicine, he co-developed the paired T-cell receptor (TCR) and B-cell receptor (BCR) immune-repertoire sequencing technology that underpins the new programme.
Each person carries millions of different immune receptors, creating a highly individual picture of what their immune system is equipped to recognise and fight. This diversity changes with age, but scientists do not yet understand those changes at a population scale.
The new programme will use existing samples from healthy people across a wide range of ages to analyse millions of pairs of immune receptors, with the aim of creating the largest dataset of its kind. Researchers will search for patterns associated with age and sex and investigate what they can reveal about the decline in immune function as people get older.
Prof Aarts said:
Our immune systems change profoundly as we age, yet we know surprisingly little about what healthy immune ageing looks like. By analysing millions of immune receptors, we hope to understand why some people stay healthy for longer and whether we can identify disease risk before symptoms appear
The researchers hope the work will help explain why people differ in their ability to fight infections and respond to vaccines, as well as shedding light on differences in disease risk between men and women.
In the longer term, the programme will investigate whether the immune system has a measurable biological age of its own. An individual’s immune system may not age at the same rate as the rest of their body. Understanding the hallmarks of healthy immune ageing could therefore provide a new way to identify increased disease risk before symptoms appear, potentially allowing earlier intervention.
The programme is co-directed by Prof Aarts; Prof Charlotte Deane (Department of Statistics); and Prof John Frater (Nuffield Department of Medicine).
