Immunprofiling

RNA sequencing; Systems immunology; Bioinformatics; Infectious disease; Innate immune cells; Innate immune profiling; Transcriptome; Aging; Ageing; Artificial intelligence; Digital pathology; Image analysis; Immuno-oncology; Immunotherapy; Machine learning; Personalized medicine;

Immune profiling is the integrative analysis of immune cell populations, gene expression patterns, soluble mediators and immunological signaling pathways to describe the functional state of the immune system under physiological or pathological conditions. Immune profiling does not describe which disease is present, but rather the underlying immunological state. This is recorded step by step, starting from the genome via its activity state and thus to the transcriptome, as a measure of the transcriptional activity of the genes for the immune profile and for defining the clinical phenotype.

High-dimensional immune profiling has become an important clinical tool to understand the complex interactions between the immune system and age or disease (immune fitness, the effect of aging hematopoiesis on immune cells/Dolan M et al. 2025), therapies or vaccinations. Various single cell data have proven to be a promising source for the identification of biomarkers for the immune response. Efficient data integration methods, including those to reduce the dimensionality of high-dimensional single-cell data and methods, are necessary for their readability (Zhang J et al. 2023).

Conceptual clinical significance: With the term immune profiling, diagnostic medicine shifts from morphological analysis to diagnosis according to immune network states. This creates a functional concept of disease, particularly relevant for:

• inflammatory dermatoses
• autoimmune diseases
• tumor immunology
• infectiology
• personalized therapy decisions

1. Connors J et al. (2023) Using the power of innate immunoprofiling to understand vaccine design, infection, and immunity. Hum Vaccin Immunother 19:2267295.
2. Dolan M et al. (2025) Ageing, immune fitness and cancer. Nat Rev Cancer 25:848-872.
3. Koelzer VH et al. (2019) Precision immunoprofiling by image analysis and artificial intelligence. Virchows Arch 474: 511-522.
4. Zhang J et al. (2023) Statistical and machine learning methods for immunoprofiling based on single-cell data. Hum Vaccin Immunother 19:2234792.