• Press Release

Big Data Tool to Reveal Immune System Role in Diseases

  • New York, NY
  • (September 08, 2015)

Researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Princeton University have designed a new online tool that predicts the role of key proteins and genes in diseases of the human immune system. Called “ImmuNet,” details of the publically available resource were published online today in the journal Immunity.

The tool uses information compiled from 38,088 public experiments to predict new immune pathway interactions, mechanisms, and disease-associated genes. With advances in inexpensive computing power, and stored data collections becoming massive in the era of “big data,” researchers are now able to combine algorithms and models into tools like ImmuNet that pull previously unrecognized disease patterns from databases. These computational patterns are predictive, and researchers can test them with further experiments.

“This new tool unlocks the insight contained in big data, the world’s biomedical research output, to help understand immunological mechanisms and diseases,” said Stuart Sealfon, MD, Chairman and Glickenhaus Professor, Department of Neurology, Mount Sinai Health System and co-senior author of the publication. “The goal of ‘ImmuNet’ is to accelerate the understanding of immune pathways and genes, ultimately leading to the development of improved treatment for diseases with an immunological component.”

ImmuNet enables immunology researchers without special computational training to use the statistical techniques of Bayesian data integration and machine learning algorithms to “interrogate” this huge compendium of public data. Bayesian analysis is able to detect relevant information in a sea of often conflicting data obtained from diverse experiments. This form of analysis selects only the datasets that provide new insight about a pathway of interest while excluding datasets that are not relevant to the targeted pathway.  

A goal of the online tool is to advance the understanding of the immune system, the network of cells and organs that protects the body against infections and cancer. While the immunity protects against infection, immune cells may also target the body’s own cells to cause inflammation as part of many diseases where the mechanisms are not yet known.

“We expect the applicability of ImmuNet to wide ranging areas of immunology will grow with the incorporation of continually increasing public big data,” said Olga Troyanskaya, PhD, Professor, Department of Computer Science and Lewis-Sigler Institute of Integrative Genomics, Princeton University and Deputy Director of Genomics, Simons Center for Data Analysis, co-senior author of the publication. “By enabling immune researchers from diverse backgrounds to leverage these valuable and heterogeneous data collections, ImmuNet has the potential to accelerate discovery in immunology.”

This development of the online resource was funded by a grant (contract # HHSN272201000054C) from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health. Co-collaborators of the study include researchers from Yale University, New York Genome Center, and the Simons Center for Data Analysis.

About the Mount Sinai Health System

Mount Sinai Health System is one of the largest academic medical systems in the New York metro area, with more than 43,000 employees working across eight hospitals, over 400 outpatient practices, nearly 300 labs, a school of nursing, and a leading school of medicine and graduate education. Mount Sinai advances health for all people, everywhere, by taking on the most complex health care challenges of our time — discovering and applying new scientific learning and knowledge; developing safer, more effective treatments; educating the next generation of medical leaders and innovators; and supporting local communities by delivering high-quality care to all who need it.

Through the integration of its hospitals, labs, and schools, Mount Sinai offers comprehensive health care solutions from birth through geriatrics, leveraging innovative approaches such as artificial intelligence and informatics while keeping patients’ medical and emotional needs at the center of all treatment. The Health System includes approximately 7,300 primary and specialty care physicians; 13 joint-venture outpatient surgery centers throughout the five boroughs of New York City, Westchester, Long Island, and Florida; and more than 30 affiliated community health centers. We are consistently ranked by U.S. News & World Report's Best Hospitals, receiving high "Honor Roll" status, and are highly ranked: No. 1 in Geriatrics and top 20 in Cardiology/Heart Surgery, Diabetes/Endocrinology, Gastroenterology/GI Surgery, Neurology/Neurosurgery, Orthopedics, Pulmonology/Lung Surgery, Rehabilitation, and Urology. New York Eye and Ear Infirmary of Mount Sinai is ranked No. 12 in Ophthalmology. U.S. News & World Report’s “Best Children’s Hospitals” ranks Mount Sinai Kravis Children's Hospital among the country’s best in several pediatric specialties.

For more information, visit https://www.mountsinai.org or find Mount Sinai on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

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