The human immune system is one of the most complex systems in the world—and one of its most important. It determines whether we survive infancy, which diseases we get, how we age, and how long we’ll live. Within it lie the secrets of who will respond, and how, to potential threats to our health. Understanding our immune system is the key to fighting disease and improving health for all. Yet its complexity has limited our ability to tap into its potential—until now.
Recent advances in AI provide the tools to rapidly process the trillions of datapoints required to model the immune system, understand how it varies across individuals, and develop targeted approaches to elongating healthspans and combatting disease.
The Human Immunome Project (HIP) was designed to meet this moment—to combine systems biology with the power of artificial intelligence, to decode and model the immune system to improve health for all.
Our Story
The Human Immunome Project was founded in 2016 as the Human Vaccines Project—an initiative to unravel the variation of human immune response to vaccines and to lay the foundation for research advances across infectious and non-communicable diseases.
2016-2022
From 2016-2022, the Human Vaccines Project successfully built a network of leading research institutions across academia, industry, NGOs, and government. Affiliated researchers conducted some of the most in-depth studies of the human immune system the world had seen, including sequencing the B-cell receptor repertoire with Vanderbilt University and Scripps Research, and studies which used advanced machine learning to predict biological drivers of effective immunity.
In late 2022, we began our transformation into the Human Immunome Project, pivoting our mission to reflect the emerging power of AI and its ability to advance scientific discovery. In September, we convened the “Human Immunome AI Summit” to outline how we could most effectively decode and model the immune system. The Summit resulted in endorsement from more than 60 leading biomedical and AI scientists to build predictive and mechanistic models of the immune system, and charged the organization with developing a scientific plan to achieve this goal.
Fast forward to today.
The Human Immunome Project welcomed new leadership in 2023 with Hans Keirstead, PhD assuming the role of Chief Executive Officer. Throughout the year, we worked alongside our Scientific Steering Committee, led by John Tsang, PhD and Shai Shen-Orr, PhD, to articulate a global study protocol and scaling strategy to generate the world’s largest immunological dataset and build publicly available AI models of the immune system. With the release of our Scientific Strategy, we have launched HIP 2.0 and begun to execute on an actionable strategy to transform the future of global health.