U.S. Food & Drug Administration

On November 30, 2020, precisionFDA launched the COVID-19 Precision Immunology App-a-thon.

With the continuing severity and scale of the COVID-19 global pandemic, researchers and medical professionals want to better understand the relationship between a patient’s immune repertoire and associated factors and their clinical outcomes. This will allow better prediction of disease severity and progression, as well as provide tailored treatments. Additionally, the recent advent of high-throughput sequencing of lymphocyte antigen receptor genes has generated opportunities to study adaptive immune responses. However, there are challenges in determining the appropriate analysis techniques needed to explain the roles that genetic variabilities play in the individual immune response to COVID-19.

App-a-thon participants will enhance informatics analysis tools and develop innovative applications and pipelines to illuminate the relationship between personalized adaptive immunity molecular data and COVID-19 disease variables and associated factors.

This precision immunology app-a-thon submission period is open from November 30, 2020 to January 29, 2021. For more information and to pre-register, visit the app-a-thon website.