Method for identifying disease-associated CDR3 patterns in an immune repertoire

摘要

A method of developing a diagnostic test for a particular disease, the method comprising the steps of: in a sample collected from each of the multiple subjects in a group of patients and a control group, wherein the group of patients comprises subjects having the same disease and the control group comprises subjects who are healthy; amplifying and sequencing the immune repertoire of each subject in each of the two groups to identify each unique CDR3 sequence present in the samples and determine the frequency of occurrence of each unique CDR3 sequence; identifying CDR3 sequences that are shared between at least two subjects in each of the control groups and the patient group; sort the CDR3 sequences in order of frequency of appearance; identify the Linklets of each group; and identifying Linklets that are associated to a statistically significant degree with the group of patients to provide a disease signature.