iReceptor Plus stated on Tuesday that European Union (EU) and the Canadian government have awarded EUR8.4m under its international consortium project to promote human immunological data storage, integration and controlled sharing for a wide range of clinical and scientific purposes.

Under the four year project, iReceptor received EUR7.85m from the EU through the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme and an additional EUR800,000 from the Canadian government.

This project aims to develop an innovative platform to integrate distributed repositories of Adaptive Immune Receptor Repertoire sequencing (AIRR-seq) data for enabling improved personalised medicine and immunotherapy in cancer, inflammatory and autoimmune diseases, allergies and infectious diseases. The project will support the sharing of public AIRR-seq data, while at the same time providing a mechanism for users to protect private data when such protection is required.

Headed by Bar-Ilan University, iReceptor Plus will enable researchers around the world to share and analyze huge immunological datasets taken from healthy individuals and sick patients that have been sequenced and stored in databanks in multiple countries. It would advance the understanding of immune responses and thus provide new targets for therapies and new methods for monitoring therapeutic efficacy.

Through its academic, clinical and industrial partners, the database nodes of the iReceptor Plus network will be established at several international sites to show its effectiveness in the context of both clinical and biopharma use-cases.

The international iReceptor Plus consortium is composed of 20 partners from nine countries. It will hold its opening conference in Eilat, Israel on 14-16 January 2019.