{"id":876433,"date":"2025-10-09T22:12:37","date_gmt":"2025-10-10T03:12:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/10\/09\/how-healthy-am-i-my-immunome-knows-the-score\/"},"modified":"2025-10-09T22:12:37","modified_gmt":"2025-10-10T03:12:37","slug":"how-healthy-am-i-my-immunome-knows-the-score","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/10\/09\/how-healthy-am-i-my-immunome-knows-the-score\/","title":{"rendered":"How healthy am I? My immunome knows the score.\u00a0\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p><em>The story is a collaboration between MIT Technology Review and Aventine, a non-profit research foundation that creates and supports content about how technology and science are changing the way we live.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s not often you get a text about the robustness of your immune system, but that\u2019s what popped up on my phone last spring. Sent by John Tsang, an immunologist at Yale, the text came after his lab had put my blood through a mind-boggling array of newfangled tests. The result\u2014think of it as a full-body, high-resolution CT scan of my immune system\u2014would reveal more about the state of my health than any test I had ever taken. And it could potentially tell me far more than I wanted to know.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cDavid,\u201d the text read, \u201cyou are the red dot.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Tsang was referring to an image he had attached to the text that showed a graph with a scattering of black dots representing other people whose immune systems had been evaluated\u2014and a lone red one. There also was a score: 0.35.<\/p>\n<p>I had no idea what any of this meant.<\/p>\n<p>The red dot was the culmination of an immuno-quest I had begun on an autumn afternoon a few months earlier, when a postdoc in Tsang\u2019s lab drew several vials of my blood. It was also a significant milestone in a decades-long journey I\u2019ve taken as a journalist covering life sciences and medicine. Over the years, I\u2019ve offered myself up as a human guinea pig for hundreds of tests promising new insights into my health and mortality. In 2001, I was one of the first humans to have my <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/2002\/11\/dna-2\/\">DNA sequenced<\/a>. Soon after, in the early 2000s, researchers tapped into my proteome\u2014proteins circulating in my blood. Then came assessments of my microbiome, metabolome, and much more. I have continued to test-drive the latest protocols and devices, amassing tens of terabytes of data on myself, and I\u2019ve reported on the results in dozens of articles and a book called <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Experimental-Man-Reveals-Future-Health\/dp\/0470176784\"><em>Experimental Man<\/em><\/a>. Over time, the tests have gotten better and more informative, but no test I had previously taken promised to deliver results more comprehensive or closer to revealing the truth about my underlying state of health than what John Tsang was offering.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><strong>Over the years, I\u2019ve offered myself up as a human guinea pig for hundreds of tests promising new insights into my health and mortality. But no test I had previously taken promised to deliver results more comprehensive or closer to revealing the truth about my underlying state of health.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>It also was not lost on me that I\u2019m now 20-plus years older than I was when I took those first tests. Back in my 40s, I was ridiculously healthy. Since then, I\u2019ve been battered by various pathogens, stresses, and injuries, including two bouts of covid and long covid\u2014and, well, life.<\/p>\n<p>But I\u2019d kept my apprehensions to myself as Tsang, a slim, perpetually smiling man who directs the Yale Center for Systems and Engineering Immunology, invited me into his office in New Haven to introduce me to something called the <em>human immunome<\/em>.<\/p>\n<div>\n<figure><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" height=\"2000\" width=\"2667\" src=\"https:\/\/wp.technologyreview.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Tsang-e1759947989880.jpg?w=2691\" alt=\"John Tsang in his office\"><figcaption>John Tsang has helped create a new test for your immune system.  <\/figcaption><p>JULIE BIDWELL<\/p>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n<p>Made up of 1.8 trillion cells and trillions more proteins, metabolites, mRNA, and other biomolecules, every person\u2019s immunome is different, and it is constantly changing. It\u2019s shaped by our DNA, past illnesses, the air we have breathed, the food we have eaten, our age, and the traumas and stresses we have experienced\u2014in short, everything we have ever been exposed to physically and emotionally. Right now, your immune system is hard at work identifying and fending off viruses and rogue cells that threaten to turn cancerous\u2014or maybe already have. And it is doing an excellent job of it all, or not, depending on how healthy it happens to be at this particular moment.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<div>\n<p>Yet as critical as the immunome is to each of us, this universe of cells and molecules has remained largely beyond the reach of modern medicine\u2014a vast yet inaccessible operating system that powerfully influences everything from our vulnerability to viruses and cancer to how well we age to whether we tolerate certain foods better than others.<\/p>\n<p>Now, thanks to a slew of new technologies and to scientists like Tsang, who is on the Steering Committee of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub New York, understanding this vital and mysterious system is within our grasp, paving the way for powerful new tools and tests to help us better assess, diagnose and treat diseases.<\/p>\n<p>Already, new research is revealing patterns in the ways our bodies respond to stress and disease. Scientists are creating contrasting portraits of weak and robust immunomes\u2014portraits that someday, it\u2019s hoped, could offer new insights into patient care and perhaps detect illnesses before symptoms appear. There are plans afoot to deploy this knowledge and technology on a global scale, which would enable scientists to observe the effects of climate, geography, and countless other factors on the immunome. The results could transform what it means to be healthy and how we identify and treat disease.<\/p>\n<p>It all begins with a test that can tell you whether your immune system is healthy or not.<\/p>\n<h3>Reading the immunome<\/h3>\n<p>Sitting in his office last fall, Tsang\u2014a systems immunologist whose expertise combines computer science and immunology\u2014 began my tutorial in immunomics by introducing me to a study that he and his team wrote up in a 2024 paper published in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41591-024-03092-6\"><em>Nature Medicine<\/em><\/a>. It described the results of measurements made on blood samples taken from 270 subjects\u2014tests similar to the ones Tsang\u2019s team would be running on me. In the study, Tsang and his colleagues looked at the immune systems of 228 patients diagnosed with a variety of genetic disorders and a control group of 42 healthy people.<\/p>\n<p>To help me visualize what my results might look like, Tsang opened his laptop to reveal several colorful charts from the study, punctuated by black dots representing each person evaluated. The results reminded me vaguely of abstract paintings by Joan Mir\u00f3. But in place of colorful splotches, whirls, and circles were an assortment of scatter plots, Gantt charts, and heat maps tinted in greens, blues, oranges, and purples.<\/p>\n<p>It all looked like gibberish to me.<\/p>\n<p>Luckily, Tsang was willing to serve as my guide. Flashing his perpetually patient smile, he explained that these colorful jumbles depicted what his team had uncovered about each subject after taking blood samples and assessing the details of how well their immune cells, proteins, mRNA, and other immune system components were doing their job.<\/p>\n<div>\n<figure><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" height=\"2000\" width=\"2549\" src=\"https:\/\/wp.technologyreview.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Spot_2A_color_v1.jpg?w=2549\" alt><\/p>\n<p>IBRAHIM RAYINTAKATH<\/p>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n<p>The results placed people\u2014represented by the individual dots\u2014on a left-to-right continuum, ranging from those with unhealthy immunomes on the left to those with healthy immunomes on the right. Background colors, meanwhile, were used to identify people with different medical conditions affecting their immune systems. For example, olive-green indicated those with auto-immune disorders; orange backgrounds were designated for individuals with no known disease history. Tsang said he and his team would be placing me on a similar graph after they finished analyzing my blood.<\/p>\n<p>Tsang\u2019s measurements go significantly beyond what can be discerned from the handful of immune biomarkers that people routinely get tested for today. \u201cThe main immune cell panel typically ordered by a physician is called a CBC differential,\u201d he told me. CBC, which stands for \u201ccomplete blood count,\u201d is a decades-old type of analysis that counts levels of red blood cells, hemoglobin, and basic immune cell types (neutrophils, lymphocytes, monocytes, basophils, and eosinophils). Changes in these levels can indicate whether a person\u2019s immune system might be reacting to a virus or other infection, cancer, or something else. Other blood tests\u2014like one that looks for elevated levels of C-reactive protein, which can indicate inflammation associated with heart disease\u2014are more specific than the CBC. But they still rely on blunt counting\u2014in this case of certain proteins.<\/p>\n<p>Tsang\u2019s assessment, by contrast, tests up to a million cells, proteins, mRNA and immune biomolecules\u2014significantly more than the CBC and others. His protocol is designed to paint a more holistic portrait of a person\u2019s immune system by not only counting cells and molecules but also by assessing their interactions. The CBC \u201cdoesn\u2019t tell me as a physician what the cells being counted are doing,\u201d says Rachel Sparks, a clinical immunologist who was the lead author of the <em>Nature Medicine<\/em> study and is now a translational medicine physician with the drug giant AstraZeneca. \u201cI just know that there are more neutrophils than normal, which may or may not indicate that they\u2019re behaving badly. We now have technology that allows us to see at a granular level what a cell is actually <em>doing<\/em> when a virus appears\u2014how it\u2019s changing and reacting.\u201d<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><strong>Tsang\u2019s measurements go significantly beyond what can be discerned from the handful of immune biomarkers that people routinely get tested for today. His assessment tests up to a million cells, proteins, mRNA and immune biomolecules.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Such breakthroughs have been made possible thanks to a raft of new and improved technologies that have evolved over the past decade, allowing scientists like Tsang and Sparks to explore the intricacies of the immunome with newfound precision. These include devices that can count myriad different types of cells and biomolecules, as well as advanced sequencers that identify and characterize DNA, RNA, proteins, and other molecules. There are now instruments that also can measure thousands of changes and reactions that occur inside a single immune cell as it reacts to a virus or other threat.<\/p>\n<p>Tsang and Spark\u2019s\u2019 team used data generated by such measurements to identify and characterize a series of signals distinctive to unhealthy immune systems. Then they used the presence or absence of these signals to create a numerical assessment of the health of a person\u2019s immunome\u2014a score they call an \u201cimmune health metric,\u201d or IHM.<\/p>\n<div>\n<figure><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" height=\"2000\" width=\"2667\" src=\"https:\/\/wp.technologyreview.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Sparks-e1759947971712.jpg?w=2680\" alt=\"Rachel Sparks outdoors in a green space\"><figcaption>Clinical immunologist Rachel Sparks hopes new tests can improve medical care. <\/figcaption><p>JARED SOARES<\/p>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n<p>To make sense of the crush of data being collected, Tsang\u2019s team used machine-learning algorithms that correlated the results of the many measurements with a patient\u2019s known health status and age. They also used AI to compare their findings with immune system data collected elsewhere. All this allowed them to determine and validate an IHM score for each person, and to place it on their spectrum, identifying that person as healthy or not.<\/p>\n<p>It all came together for the first time with the publication of the <em>Nature Medicine<\/em> paper, in which Tsang and his colleagues reported the results from testing multiple immune variables in the 270 subjects. They also announced a remarkable discovery: Patients with different kinds of diseases reacted with similar disruptions to their immunomes. For instance, many showed a lower level of the aptly named natural killer immune cells, regardless of what they were suffering from. Critically, the immune profiles of those with diagnosed diseases tended to look very different from those belonging to the outwardly healthy people in the study. And, as expected, immune health declined in the older patients.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<div>\n<p>But then the results got <em>really<\/em> interesting. In a few cases, the immune systems of \u00a0unhealthy and healthy people looked similar, with some people appearing near the \u201chealthy\u201d area of the chart even though they were known to have diseases. Most likely this was because their symptoms were in remission and not causing an immune reaction at the moment when their blood was drawn, Tsang told me.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>In other cases, people without a known disease showed up on the chart closer to those who were known to be sick. \u201cSome of these people who appear to be in good health are overlapping with pathology that traditional metrics can\u2019t spot,\u201d says Tsang, whose <em>Nature Medicine<\/em> paper reported that roughly half the healthy individuals in the study had IHM scores that overlapped with those of people known to be sick. Either these seemingly healthy people had normal immune systems that were busy fending off, say, a passing virus, or\u00a0 their immune systems had been impacted by aging and the vicissitudes of life. Potentially more worrisome, they were harboring an illness or stress that was not yet making them ill but might do so eventually.<\/p>\n<p>These findings have obvious implications for medicine. Spotting a low immune score in a seemingly healthy person could make it possible to identify and start treating an illness before symptoms appear, diseases worsen, or tumors grow and metastasize. IHM-style evaluations could also provide clues as to why some people respond differently to viruses like the one that causes covid, and why vaccines\u2014which are designed to activate a healthy immune system\u2014might not work as well in people whose immune systems are compromised.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><strong>Spotting a low immune score in a seemingly healthy person could make it possible to identify and start treating an illness before symptoms appear, diseases worsen, or tumors grow and metastasize.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>\u201cOne of the more surprising things about the last pandemic was that all sorts of random younger people who seemed very healthy got sick and then they were gone,\u201d says Mark Davis, a Stanford immunologist who helped pioneer the science being developed in labs like Tsang\u2019s. \u201cSome had underlying conditions like obesity and diabetes, but some did not. So the question is, could we have pointed out that something was off with these folks\u2019 immune systems? Could we have diagnosed that and warned people to take extra precautions?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Tsang\u2019s IHM test is designed to answer a simple question: What is the relative health of your immune system? But there are other assessments being developed to provide more detailed information on how the body is doing. Tsang\u2019s own team is working on a panel of additional scores aimed at getting finer detail on specific immune conditions. These include a test that measures the health of a person\u2019s bone marrow, which makes immune cells. \u201cIf you have a bone marrow stress or inflammatory condition in the bone marrow, you could have lower capacity to produce cells, which will be reflected by this score,\u201d he says. Another detailed metric will measure protein levels to predict how a person will respond to a virus.<\/p>\n<p>Tsang hopes that an IHM-style test will one day be part of a standard physical exam\u2014a snapshot of a patient\u2019s immune system that could inform care. For instance, has a period of intense stress compromised the immune system, making it less able to fend off this season\u2019s flu? Will someone\u2019s score predict a better or worse response to a vaccine or a cancer drug? How does a person\u2019s immune system change with age?<\/p>\n<p>Or, as I anxiously wondered while waiting to learn my own score, will the results reveal an underlying disorder or disease, silently ticking away until it shows itself?<\/p>\n<h3>Toward a human immunome project\u00a0\u00a0<\/h3>\n<p>The quest to create advanced tests like the IHM for the immune system began more than 15 years ago, when scientists like Mark Davis became frustrated with a field in which research\u2014primarily in mice\u2014was focused mostly on individual immune cells and proteins. In 2007 he launched the <a href=\"https:\/\/iti.stanford.edu\/himc.html\">Stanford Human Immune Monitoring Center<\/a>, one of the first efforts to conceptualize the human immunome as a holistic, body-wide network in human beings. Speaking by Zoom from his office in Palo Alto, California, Davis told me that the effort had spawned other projects, including a landmark twin study showing that a lot of <a href=\"https:\/\/med.stanford.edu\/news\/all-news\/2015\/01\/environment-not-genes-plays-starring-role-in-immune-variation.html\">immune variation is not genetic, which was then the prevailing theory, but is heavily influenced by environmental<\/a> factors\u2014a major shift in scientists\u2019 understanding.<\/p>\n<div>\n<figure><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" height=\"2000\" width=\"2005\" src=\"https:\/\/wp.technologyreview.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Shenn-Orr-e1759941355132.jpg?w=2055\" alt=\"Shai Shen-Orr\"><figcaption>Shai Shen-Orr sees a day when people will check their immune scores on an app. <\/figcaption><p>COURTESY OF SHAI SHEN-ORR<\/p>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n<p>Davis and others also laid the groundwork for tests like John Tsang\u2019s by discovering how a T cell\u2014among the most common and important immune players\u2014can recognize pathogens, cancerous cells, and other threats, triggering defensive measures that can include destroying the threat. This and other discoveries have revealed many of the basic mechanics of how immune cells work, says Davis, \u201cbut there\u2019s still a lot we have to learn.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>One researcher working with Davis in those early days was Shai Shen-Orr, who is now director of the Zimin Institute for AI Solutions in Healthcare at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, based in Haifa, Israel. (He\u2019s also a frequent collaborator with Tsang.) Shen-Orr, like Tsang, is a systems immunologist. He recalls that in 2007, when he was a postdoc in Davis\u2019s lab, immunologists had identified around 100 cell types and a similar number of cytokines\u2014proteins that act as messengers in the immune system. But they weren\u2019t able to measure them simultaneously, which limited visibility into how the immune system works as a whole. Today, Shen-Orr says, immunologists can measure hundreds of cell types and thousands of proteins and watch them interact.<\/p>\n<p>Shen-Orr\u2019s current lab has developed its own version of an immunome test that he calls IMM-AGE (short for \u201cimmune age\u201d), the basics of which were published in a 2019 paper in <a href=\"https:\/\/pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/30842675\/\"><em>Nature Medicine<\/em><\/a>. IMM-AGE looks at the composition of people\u2019s immune systems\u2014how many of each type of immune cell they have and how these numbers change as they age. His team has used this information primarily to ascertain a person\u2019s risk of heart disease.<\/p>\n<p>Shen-Orr also has been a vociferous advocate for expanding the pool of test samples, which now come mostly from Americans and Europeans. \u201cWe need to understand why different people in different environments react differently and how that works,\u201d he says. \u201cWe also need to test a lot more people\u2014maybe millions.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Tsang has seen why a limited sample size can pose problems. In 2013, he says, researchers at the National Institutes of Health came up with <a href=\"https:\/\/pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/articles\/PMC3736123\/\">a malaria vaccine<\/a> that was effective for almost everyone who got it during clinical trials conducted in Maryland. \u201cBut in Africa,\u201d he says, \u201cit only worked for about 25% of the people.\u201d He attributes this to the significant differences in genetics, diet, climate, and other environmental factors that cause people\u2019s immunomes to develop differently. \u201cWhy?\u201d he asks. \u201cWhat exactly was different about the immune systems in Maryland and Tanzania? That\u2019s what we need to understand so we can design personalized vaccines and treatments.\u201d<\/p>\n<figure>\n<blockquote>\n<p><strong>\u201cWhat exactly was different about the immune systems in Maryland and Tanzania? That\u2019s what we need to understand so we can design personalized vaccines and treatments.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><cite>John Tsang<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n<p>For several years, Tsang and Shen-Orr have advocated going global with testing, \u201cbut there has been resistance,\u201d Shen-Orr says. \u201cLook, medicine is conservative and moves slowly, and the technology is expensive and labor intensive.\u201d They finally got the audience they needed at a 2022 conference in La Jolla, California, convened by the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.humanimmunomeproject.org\/about\/#:~:text=The%20Human%20Immunome%20Project%20was,infectious%20and%20non%2Dcommunicable%20diseases.\">Human Immunome Project<\/a>, or HIP. (The organization was originally founded in 2016 to create more effective vaccines but had recently changed its name to emphasize a pivot from just vaccines to the wider field of immunome science.) It was in La Jolla that they met HIP\u2019s then-new chairperson, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.humanimmunomeproject.org\/about\/team\/jane-metcalfe\/\">Jane Metcalfe<\/a>, a cofounder of <em>Wired<\/em> magazine, who saw what was at stake.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe\u2019ve got all of these advanced molecular immunological profiles being developed,\u201d she said, \u201cbut we can\u2019t begin to predict the breadth of immune system variability if we\u2019re\u00a0 only testing small numbers of people in Palo Alto or Tel Aviv. And that\u2019s when the big aha moment struck us that we need sites everywhere to collect that information so we can build proper computer models and a predictive understanding of the human immune system.\u201d<\/p>\n<div>\n<figure><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" height=\"2000\" width=\"2549\" src=\"https:\/\/wp.technologyreview.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Spot_2B_color_v1.jpg?w=2549\" alt><\/p>\n<p>IBRAHIM RAYINTAKATH<\/p>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n<p>Following that meeting, HIP created a new scientific plan, with Tsang and Shen-Orr as chief science officers. The group set an ambitious goal of raising around $3 billion over the next 10 years\u2014a goal Tsang and Metcalfe say will be met by working in conjunction with a broad network of public and private supporters. Cutbacks in federal funding for biomedical research in the US may limit funds from this traditional source, but HIP plans to work with government agencies outside the US too, with the goal of creating a comprehensive global immunological database.<\/p>\n<p>HIP\u2019s plan is to first develop a pilot version based on Tsang\u2019s test, which it will call the Immune Monitoring Kit, to test a few thousand people in Africa, Australia, East Asia, Europe, the US, and Israel. The initial effort, according to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.humanimmunomeproject.org\/about\/team\/jane-metcalfe\/\">Metcalfe<\/a>, is expected to begin by the end of the year. \u00a0<\/p>\n<p>After that, HIP would like to expand to some 150 sites around the world, eventually assessing about 250,000 people and collecting a vast cache of data and insights that Tsang believes will profoundly affect\u2014even revolutionize\u2014clinical medicine, public health, and drug development.<\/p>\n<h3>My immune health metric score is \u2026<\/h3>\n<p>As HIP develops its pilot study to take on the world, John Tsang, for better or worse, has added one more North American Caucasian male to the small number of people who have received an IHM score to date. That would be me.<\/p>\n<p>It took a long time to get my score, but Tsang didn\u2019t leave me hanging once he pinged me the red dot. \u201cWe plotted you with other participants who are clinically quite healthy,\u201d he texted, referring to a cluster of black dots on the grid he had sent, although he cautioned that the group I\u2019m being compared with includes only a few dozen people. \u201cHigher IHM means better immune health,\u201d he wrote, referring to my 0.35 score, which he described as a number on an arbitrary scale. \u201cAs you can see, your IHM is right in the middle of a bunch of people 20 years younger.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This was a relief, given that our immune system, like so many other bodily functions, declines with age\u2014though obviously at different rates. Yet I also felt a certain disappointment. To be honest, I had expected more granular detail after having a million or so cells and markers tested\u2014like perhaps some insights on why I got long covid (twice) and others didn\u2019t. Tsang and other scientists are working on ways to extract more specific information from the tests. Still, he insists that the single score itself is a powerful tool to understand the general state of our immunomes, indicating the absence or presence of underlying health issues that might not be revealed in traditional testing.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><strong>To be honest, I had expected more granular detail after having a million or so cells and markers tested\u2014like perhaps some insights on why I got long covid (twice) and others didn\u2019t.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>I asked Tsang what my score meant for my future. \u201cYour score is always changing depending on what you\u2019re exposed to and due to age,\u201d he said, adding that the IHM is still so new that it\u2019s hard to know exactly what the score means until researchers do more work\u2014and until HIP can evaluate and compare thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. They also need to keep testing me over time to see how my immune system changes as it\u2019s exposed to new perturbations and stresses.<\/p>\n<p>For now, I\u2019m left with a simple number. Though it tells me little about the detailed workings of my immune system, the good news is that it raises no red flags. My immune system, it turns out, is pretty healthy.<\/p>\n<p>A few days after receiving my score from Tsang, I heard from Shen-Orr about more results. Tsang had shared my data with his lab so that he could run his IMM-AGE protocol on my immunome and provide me with another score to worry about. Shen-Orr\u2019s result put the age of my immune system at around 57\u2014still 10 years younger than my true age.<\/p>\n<h3><strong>The c<\/strong>oming age of the immunome<\/h3>\n<p>Shai Shen-Orr imagines a day when people will be able to check their advanced IHM and IMM-AGE scores\u2014or their HIP Immune Monitoring Kit score\u2014on an app after a blood draw, the way they now check health data such as heart rate and blood pressure. Jane Metcalfe talks about linking IHM-type measurements and analyses with rising global temperatures and steamier days and nights to study how global warming might affect the immune system of, say, a newborn or a pregnant woman. \u201cThis could be plugged into other people\u2019s models and really help us understand the effects of pollution, nutrition, or climate change on human health,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n<figure>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\u201cI think [in 10 years] I\u2019ll be able to use this much more granular understanding of what the immune system is doing at the cellular level in my patients. And hopefully we could target our therapies more directly to those cells or pathways that are contributing to disease.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><cite>Rachel Sparks<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n<p>Other clues could also be on the horizon. \u201cAt some point we\u2019ll have IHM scores that can provide data on who will be most affected by a virus during a pandemic,\u201d Tsang says. Maybe that will help researchers engineer an immune system response that shuts down the virus before it spreads. He says it\u2019s possible to run a test like that now, but it remains experimental and will take years to fully develop, test for safety and accuracy, and establish standards and protocols for use as a tool of global public health. \u201cThese things take a long time,\u201d he says.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The same goes for bringing IHM-style tests into the exam room, so doctors like Rachel Sparks can use the results to help treat their patients. \u201cI think in 10 years, with some effort, we really could have something useful,\u201d says Stanford\u2019s Mark Davis. Sparks agrees. \u201cI think by then I\u2019ll be able to use this much more granular understanding of what the immune system is doing at the cellular level in my patients,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd hopefully we could target our therapies more directly to those cells or pathways that are contributing to disease.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Personally, I\u2019ll wait for more details with a mix of impatience, curiosity, and at least a hint of concern. I wonder what more the immune circuitry deep inside me might reveal about whether I\u2019m healthy at this very moment, or will be tomorrow, or next month, or years from now.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><em><a href=\"https:\/\/nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com\/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.duncanfusion.com%2F&#038;data=05%7C02%7C%7C0e4e45a306484049126b08de067c9982%7C961f23f8614c4756bafff1997766a273%7C1%7C0%7C638955329418345212%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&#038;sdata=LfPqwkqhJwYmXU%2FVBsQteYXrgPjLMHLK7%2BzBTgj9gLU%3D&#038;reserved=0\">David Ewing Duncan<\/a>\u00a0is an award-winning science writer. For more information on this story check out his\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com\/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdavideduncan.substack.com%2F&#038;data=05%7C02%7C%7C0e4e45a306484049126b08de067c9982%7C961f23f8614c4756bafff1997766a273%7C1%7C0%7C638955329418357295%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&#038;sdata=wbTyp4HCxRAZiiFSbaiRiBXNr2L6K58FwcNfUqktNCw%3D&#038;reserved=0\">Futures Column on Substack<\/a>.<\/em> <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.technologyreview.com\/2025\/10\/09\/1125376\/how-healthy-am-i-my-immunome-knows-the-score\/\" class=\"button purchase\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Read More<\/a><br \/>\n David Ewing Duncan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The story is a collaboration between MIT Technology Review and Aventine, a non-profit research foundation that creates and supports content about how technology and science are changing the way we live. It\u2019s not often you get a text about the robustness of your immune system, but that\u2019s what popped up on my phone last spring.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":876434,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22531,146655,46],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-876433","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthy","8":"category-immunome","9":"category-technology"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/876433","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=876433"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/876433\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/876434"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=876433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=876433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=876433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}