The immune system has been touted as the body’s ‘second brain’ by virtue of its formidable information processing capabilities that in turn give rise to a broad range of sophisticated context-specific and time-dependent emergent behaviors. Indeed, the immune system exhibits, at least conceptually, many of the same cognitive functions as the brain: it perceives, assesses, plans and executes a coordinated set of responses, surveys the resulting effects and commits these to memory. This complex immune behavior might be thought of as a ‘mob’ intelligence, that emerges from the actions and exchanges between groups of functionally diverse discrete agents. These cellular actors are spatially distributed within and across anatomical compartments, able to message, migrate, assemble, cooperate and subsequently disperse.
While terrific strides have been made to describe the immune response at increasing levels of temporal and biological granularity, our understanding of the immune system as a programable computing machine and of the algorithms it employs is still in its infancy. Bridging across multiple disciplines, continued evolution in this field will be fueled by our ability to leverage and translate concepts from the mathematical and engineering sciences into the biological and clinical sciences – and vice versa. Concepts from complexity and chaos theory, control and dynamic systems theory, information theory, theoretical computer science and others will all be required if we want to understand complex and essential aspects of immunity.
In this collection, we want to encourage a transdisciplinary view of complex areas of immunology where alternate and inappropriate response behaviors have been adopted – alternate response algorithms enacted under challenge that persist to become chronic dysregulated disease states or “regulatory traps”. Under this Research Topic we particularly welcome Original Research, Review, Methods, and Perspective articles investigating some of the following subtopics using a range of approaches:
• Explaining the immune programs that direct robust vaccine response, clonal expansion, and manage immune memory and how these can be manipulated through interventions such as BCG vaccination or T-cell vaccination against inappropriately released self-antigens i.e., autoimmunization.
• Designing intervention strategies to dampen excessive immune sensitivity and disrupt autoimmune cascades by reprogramming the underlying molecular and cellular processes that drive these behaviors.
• Understanding as a distributed computing problem the microbiome-immune co-evolution and how the immune ecosystem re-organizes in acquired and persistent immune dysfunction.
• Explaining how immune programs can be corrupted and rewritten by pathogens leading to, for example, inappropriate immune tolerance and premature immune ageing.
• Understanding the inherent vulnerabilities of immune programs and how these might fail or be modified to foster immune evasion in cancer, for example.
• Understanding the mechanisms that write the immune programs (metaprogramming) and how the immune system reinvents itself through reinforcement learning and adaptive reprogramming in different physiological or pathological states.
Topic Editor Dr. Gordon Broderick received financial support from Elsevier BV. Topic Editor Prof. Sol Efroni is the founder and CEO of CSO of Clonal. The other Topic Editors declare no competing interests with regard to the Research Topic subject.
The immune system has been touted as the body’s ‘second brain’ by virtue of its formidable information processing capabilities that in turn give rise to a broad range of sophisticated context-specific and time-dependent emergent behaviors. Indeed, the immune system exhibits, at least conceptually, many of the same cognitive functions as the brain: it perceives, assesses, plans and executes a coordinated set of responses, surveys the resulting effects and commits these to memory. This complex immune behavior might be thought of as a ‘mob’ intelligence, that emerges from the actions and exchanges between groups of functionally diverse discrete agents. These cellular actors are spatially distributed within and across anatomical compartments, able to message, migrate, assemble, cooperate and subsequently disperse.
While terrific strides have been made to describe the immune response at increasing levels of temporal and biological granularity, our understanding of the immune system as a programable computing machine and of the algorithms it employs is still in its infancy. Bridging across multiple disciplines, continued evolution in this field will be fueled by our ability to leverage and translate concepts from the mathematical and engineering sciences into the biological and clinical sciences – and vice versa. Concepts from complexity and chaos theory, control and dynamic systems theory, information theory, theoretical computer science and others will all be required if we want to understand complex and essential aspects of immunity.
In this collection, we want to encourage a transdisciplinary view of complex areas of immunology where alternate and inappropriate response behaviors have been adopted – alternate response algorithms enacted under challenge that persist to become chronic dysregulated disease states or “regulatory traps”. Under this Research Topic we particularly welcome Original Research, Review, Methods, and Perspective articles investigating some of the following subtopics using a range of approaches:
• Explaining the immune programs that direct robust vaccine response, clonal expansion, and manage immune memory and how these can be manipulated through interventions such as BCG vaccination or T-cell vaccination against inappropriately released self-antigens i.e., autoimmunization.
• Designing intervention strategies to dampen excessive immune sensitivity and disrupt autoimmune cascades by reprogramming the underlying molecular and cellular processes that drive these behaviors.
• Understanding as a distributed computing problem the microbiome-immune co-evolution and how the immune ecosystem re-organizes in acquired and persistent immune dysfunction.
• Explaining how immune programs can be corrupted and rewritten by pathogens leading to, for example, inappropriate immune tolerance and premature immune ageing.
• Understanding the inherent vulnerabilities of immune programs and how these might fail or be modified to foster immune evasion in cancer, for example.
• Understanding the mechanisms that write the immune programs (metaprogramming) and how the immune system reinvents itself through reinforcement learning and adaptive reprogramming in different physiological or pathological states.
Topic Editor Dr. Gordon Broderick received financial support from Elsevier BV. Topic Editor Prof. Sol Efroni is the founder and CEO of CSO of Clonal. The other Topic Editors declare no competing interests with regard to the Research Topic subject.
