iReceptor Bags $9.6M in International Funding for Data Sharing Platform

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The iReceptor Plus consortium, which is composed of more than 20 partners from nine countries, was granted approximately $9.6 million by the European Union and the Canadian government to promote human immunological data storage, integration and controlled sharing for clinical and scientific purposes, according to the company.

The four-year project, headed by Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel, will expand the iReceptor platform that was developed with more than $1.9 million in funding from the Canadian government. The platform integrates distributed repositories of Adaptive Immune Receptor Repertoire sequence data, characterizing antibodies and T-cell receptors from large quantities of immune cells.

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According to the company, the platform will enhance data security, add analysis tools and integrate Adaptive Immune Receptor Repertoire sequence data with other data to offer an advanced immune-profiling hub.

“iReceptor Plus will advance the understanding of immune responses, and thus provide new targets for therapies and new methods for monitoring therapeutic efficacy,” said Gur Yaari, coordinator of the iReceptor Plus project and associate professor at the Alexander Kofkin Faculty of Engineering at Bar-Ilan University.

The integration of Adaptive Immune Receptor Repertoire sequence data will facilitate the analysis and international sharing of the data across labs, diseases and institutions.

“iReceptor Plus will improve our ability to share and compare (Adaptive Immune Receptor Repertoire sequence) data and will also promote the discovery of biomedical interventions that manipulate the adaptive immune system, such as vaccines and other immunotherapies,” said Felix Breden, lead scientist for iReceptor’s initial development and scientific manager of the current project.

Database nodes of the iReceptor Plus network will be established at multiple international sites.

Funding was led by the European Union through the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, which contributed about $8.9 million.

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