The iReceptor Canadian team visited the San Francisco Bay Area from March 8-10, 2020 to engage industrial partners in the iReceptor Plus (iR+) Consortium (MedGenome and 10X Genomics), and to reach out to a possible new partner, the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub. Brian Corrie, Technical Manager iR+, attended virtually, and the CZ Biohub meeting turned virtual at the last minute due to caution about the novel corona virus, but Pam Borghardt, Managing Director of iReceptor Canada, and Felix Breden, Scientific Manager of iR+, met with MedGenome and 10X Genomics. Such face-to-face meetings were not allowed after this period, but our trip to the Bay Area was very successful.
At CZ Biohub, we met with scientists Eric Waltari and John Prak. We discussed the possibility of establishing an AIRR-seq repository at CZ Biohub, linking data from the 3 major institutions forming the core of the hub: Stanford, UCSF and Berkeley.
MedGenome is an international genomics company, providing sequencing services using a variety of platforms. We continue to work with Dr. Amit Chaudhuri of MedGenome to plan a repository that would allow curating, and sharing when appropriate, of AIRR-seq for their customers.
Finally, we spent our last day at 10X Genomics, hosted by Staff Scientist Dr. Sarah Taylor. We discussed several plans with the marketing and bioinformatics groups. First, as part of the iR+ Consortium, the team at VDJServer, an AIRR-compliant repository and analysis platform developed at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, will provide a repository for 10X Genomics AIRR-seq data. This will include the Company’s own data and in the future customers’ data produced by 10X. Our future plan is to expand the AIRR-compliant, iReceptor database to include the new types of data that 10X Genomic’s very popular Chromium Single Cell Immune Profiling Solution will be producing. This single cell technology will be critical to many advances in immunotherapy. iR+ Consortium member Christian Busse from the German Cancer Research Center also joined our meeting virtually, and the iReceptor team looks forward to coordinating with all these partners in providing support for curating and analyzing AIRR-seq data integrated with other immunological data at the single cell level.