Our immune system is the best doctor. It diagnoses and treats most diseases. We have developed methods to learn from and improve the success rate of our immune system.
The human immune system
The immune system is the body’s way of recognizing threats; external threats such as bacteria, virus, and fungus; and internal threats such as cancer. Our immune system activates appropriate defence mechanisms to keep us alive.
The immune response recognizes threats as antigens (molecular markers on or in the threatening organism or cell). Recognition is mediated by receptors found primarily on immune T-cells and B-cells.
Immune receptors are disease sensors. An individual can make billions of different antibody molecules, each with a distinct antigen-binding site. Each antibody recognizes its antigens with great specificity.
Life stages and immune repertoire
The immune system’s capacity to respond can be measured and is called the individuals’ immune diversity or immune repertoire. Throughout the course of a life-time, the immune repertoire changes dynamically in response to health exposures.
With age, your immune system diversity and capacity diminishes. When you are very young, your immune system has a lot of potential, but it is less efficient.
At birth, our immune system has yet to be exposed to threats and the immune diversity is at its maximum. The immune system is flexibly equipped to meet the unknown threats that lay ahead.
Vaccinations train/specialize our immune receptors to combat particular diseases. An evolved immune system is capable of recognizing 10^15 antigens to store in the immune system arsenal.
The immune system becomes increasingly less diverse as it defends against threats encountered through life. In response to a critical threat, the immune system can become depleted.
As such, the immune surveillance system becomes very effective but less diverse and less flexible with age. With age, the immune system becomes more vulnerable towards many diseases.
We can measure the immune system using genomic sequencing. The measured immune system diversity represents the capacity for an adaptive immune system response.
Immune repertoire results can be visualized where each rounded square represents a clonotype (unique CDR3 sequences) and their size correspond to the frequency. A healthy person will have a diversified repertoire, meaning the immune system has capacity to deal with various threats.
Immune repertoire visualized with Clonotype Frequency Maps:
Fig. 1. Young immune system
Fig. 2. Old immune system