BackgroundA significant fraction of the more than 18 million scientific articles currently indexed in the PubMed database are related to immune responses to various agents, including infectious microbes, autoantigens, allergens, transplants, cancer antigens and others. The Immune Epitope Database (IEDB) is an online repository that catalogs immune epitope reactivity data derived from articles listed in the National Library of Medicine PubMed database. The IEDB is maintained and continually updated by monitoring PubMed for new, potentially relevant references.MethodologyHerein we detail the classification of all epitope-specific literature in over 100 different immunological domains representing Infectious Diseases and Microbes, Autoimmunity, Allergy, Transplantation and Cancer. The relative number of references in each category reflects past and present areas of research on immune reactivities. In addition to describing the overall landscape of data distribution, this particular characterization of the epitope reference data also allows for the exploration of possible correlations with global disease morbidity and mortality data.Conclusions/SignificanceWhile in most cases diseases associated with high morbidity and mortality rates were amongst the most studied, a number of high impact diseases such as dengue, Schistosoma, HSV-2, B. pertussis and Chlamydia trachoma, were found to have very little coverage. The data analyzed in this fashion represents the first estimate of how reported immunological data corresponds to disease-related morbidity and mortality, and confirms significant discrepancies in the overall research foci versus disease burden, thus identifying important gaps to be pursued by future research. These findings may also provide a justification for redirecting a portion of research funds into some of the underfunded, critical disease areas.

Colorectal cancer is a leading cause of cancer related deaths in the U.S., with African-Americans having higher incidence and mortality rates than Caucasian-Americans. Recent studies have demonstrated that anti-tumor cytotoxic T lymphocytes provide protection to patients with colon cancer while patients deficient in these responses have significantly worse prognosis. To determine if differences in cytotoxic immunity might play a role in racial disparities in colorectal cancer 258 microsatellite-stable colon tumors were examined for infiltrating immune biomarkers via immunohistochemistry. Descriptive summary statistics were calculated using two-sample Wilcoxon rank sum tests, while linear regression models with log-transformed data were used to assess differences in race and Pearson and Spearman correlations were used to correlate different biomarkers. The association between different biomarkers was also assessed using linear regression after adjusting for covariates. No significant differences were observed in CD8+ (p = 0.83), CD57+ (p = 0.55), and IL-17-expressing (p = 0.63) cell numbers within the tumor samples tested. When infiltration of granzyme B+ cells was analyzed, however, a significant difference was observed, with African Americans having lower infiltration of cells expressing this cytotoxic marker than Caucasians (p<0.01). Analysis of infiltrating granzyme B+ cells at the invasive borders of the tumor revealed an even greater difference by race (p<0.001). Taken together, the data presented suggest differences in anti-tumor immune cytotoxicity may be a contributing factor in the racial disparities observed in colorectal cancer.

This paper explores ways in which scholarly skill and expertise might be embodied in tools and sustainable practices that enable communities to create and manage their own digital archives. We focus particularly on tools and practices related to the recording and annotation of digitised materials. The paper is based on co-production practice in two very different kinds of community. Although the communities are different we find that tools designed specifically for one are valuable for others, thus offering the promise of general tools to support community-centred digitisation and potentially also traditional archival practice.