Mapping the immune system for a healthier future

The immune system is incredibly complex, so much so that we still don’t quite know how a healthy immune system develops throughout childhood. 

PhD student Xiaohan Xu from UQ’s Child Health Research Centre is searching for the answer, studying blood samples of healthy children from infancy to adolescence. 

“My PhD research focuses on understanding how the immune system develops during childhood,” Ms Xu said. 

“Through blood samples I use different advanced genomic technologies to look at the different types of immune cells and how they change as children grow.

“In simple terms, I’m trying to build a detailed picture of what a healthy developing immune system looks like at different ages. 

“This can help us understand what changes are part of normal development, and what changes may be associated with disease.”

For Ms Xu, the complexity of the immune system is what drew her to this research area.

“We often think of the immune system simply as something that protects us from infections, but it changes substantially as we grow,” Ms Xu said. 

“Having a clear picture of normal development is important because it gives us a reference point for identifying when something may be different.

“This is particularly relevant for children with diseases such as cancer, or autoimmune conditions, where the immune system can behave differently.

“By first understanding what is ‘normal’, we can better recognise and investigate what is not.”

The goal of Xu’s research is to develop a detailed reference map of immune development throughout childhood. 

“Ultimately, I hope this work will provide a useful resource for researchers and clinicians studying childhood diseases,” Ms Xu said.

“In the long term, this research could help researchers identify abnormal immune patterns that may be associated with disease.

“This could lead to earlier detection, better disease understanding and eventually more personalised approaches to treatment.”

For now, Ms Xu is focused on the next step of her research, expanding and analysing data from a cohort of healthy children.

“We are bringing together information from several types of genomic data to create a more complete picture of each child’s immune system,” Ms Xu said. 

“We will then use this reference of healthy children to investigate how immune systems develop differently to children with cancer.

“One of the things I find most exciting about this research is how much information we can now obtain from a single blood sample.

“With modern genomic technologies we can study thousands of genes and individual immune cells at the same time.

“The challenge is turning this data into something meaningful, which is where bioinformatics comes in.

“I use bioinformatics, which combines biology, data science and computational analysis to make sense of this data so we can improve our understanding of children’s health.”