Our immune system defends us from the environmental threats, such as bacterial, parasitic and viral infections. Optimal immunological homeostasis is reached when the threat is removed with the highest efficiency while avoiding collateral tissue damage of the host. This immunological balance is different between women and men. The underlying biological mechanisms have not been systematically examined. The goal of the whole RU is to move beyond of simple acknowledgement of sex differences in immune responces, and to systematically investigate the mechanisms underlying sex-specific differences in immunity against self and foreign. The RU consists of 9 subprojects, which research different aspects of sex differences in immunity. We work on the subproject P9: Sex-specific differences in immunity and infection: an integrative approach. The goals of this subproject are development and maintenance of a semantic data integration platform, which includes semantically annotated and versioned data, download and analysis workflows, a python library for Jupyter notebooks and dashboards for information publishing, as well as integrative analysis of sex differences in immune responses across multiple immune mediated diseases to discover common and distinct biological mechanisms. The analyses are based on various use cases: we start from one autoimmune disease (Inflammatory Bowel Disease) and will generalize the models for other autoimmune diseases (psoriasis, multiple sclerosis etc.) as well as for other diseases in the RU (autoimmune liver diseases, influenza, cancer etc.)
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