HISE is a platform to share, analyze, and interpret findings resulting from studies of the human immune system in health and disease. In the spirit of open science, one of the Allen Institute's founding credos, and to accelerate immunological research to speed therapeutic discoveries, the Allen Institute for Immunology built this public portal to share key data and other resources with the scientific community. The portal supports multiple research collaborations, including studies of SARS-CoV-2 infections and long COVID; autoimmune diseases (namely, rheumatoid arthritis and IBD); cancer (multiple myeloma and melanoma); and immune health.
In 2018, the Allen Institute for Immunology launched to study health and disease through longitudinal studies tracking hundreds of individuals for several years. In these studies, our researchers and collaborators collect and analyze many diverse data sets derived from blood and tissue samples such as various genetic sequencing methods, techniques that detect and measure physical and chemical characteristics of a population of cells, and measurements of protein levels. Our collaborators also collect detailed human metadata, including demographics, diet and lifestyle habits, and health history.
These studies are conducted in close collaboration with our partner researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, the Benaroya Research Institute at Virginia Mason, the University of Pennsylvania, University of California San Diego and University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. We believe that science is a collaborative activity that involves the careful cooperation amongst a team of multidisciplinary scientists; its functionality reaches beyond data storage and analysis into interpretation and discussion. Borne out of this initiative was the Human Immune System Explorer (HISE), a scientific computing platform to house and analyze these data.