Abstract

This meeting on “Systems Immunology” will constitute a unique opportunity for the field to transition from reductionist studies that have been the focus of past meetings on lymphocyte activation to a more integrated approach to the study of immune physiology and pathology from the molecular (signal transduction) to the medical (human clinical studies) scales. It will highlight the latest advances in large-scale, quantitative data collection and computational analysis as applied to biochemical aspects of immune cell activation and function, multicellular behavior in tissues and model organisms, and human immune function in health and disease. Emphasis will be placed on understanding how biological function emerges from the interaction of multiple components in networks and pathways, on the construction of quantitative models that permit predictions about systems behavior that can be tested experimentally, and on identification of reliable biomarkers and insight into disease pathogenesis that can be acquired from deep analysis of large-scale, multi-parameter data collection in humans.