This year, the immunology data repository ImmPort reaches a key milestone: 20 years since the first study was added to its repository in 2004.
ImmPort is funded by NIAID’s Division of Allergy, Immunology, and Transplantation (DAIT) in support of the NIH mission to share scientific data with the public. Data shared through the repository is provided by NIH-funded programs, other research organizations, and individual scientists, so that the data can form the foundation of future research.
After 20 years, ImmPort now contains data from over 1,000 studies, with immunologic and infectious disease data encompassing over 160 disease areas and 35 types of data.
ImmPort contains data associated with studies that range from fundamental research to clinical trials from both domestic and international laboratories. Common research areas featured in the repository include studies related to vaccination, allergy, and immune responses to pathogen infection. ImmPort contains studies on COVID-19, influenza, aging, organ transplantation, pre-term birth, and numerous other diseases and health conditions. New data are released monthly.
The impact of ImmPort on the scientific community is evident by over 1,700 publications linked to data in the repository. Access to ImmPort research and clinical data is available to researchers for any legal purpose after a brief registration process.
"For two decades, ImmPort has been pivotal in global biomedical research, offering vital immunological data that fosters innovation and improves health outcomes worldwide," said Dawei Lin, Ph.D., DAIT’s Associate Director for Bioinformatics.
Read more about ImmPort’s mission.
Supporting new hypotheses and discoveries through data sharing
Rapid and open data sharing is a priority for NIAID and NIH. By providing an open-access data sharing platform, ImmPort aims to make new discoveries quickly available to the research community for further analysis and interpretation, ultimately broadening the usefulness of scientific data. Reviewing and reusing data from past immunological studies enables researchers to generate novel hypotheses and new findings — accelerating the pace of scientific discovery.
The platform provides various tools that can help scientists to analyze and visualize their data as well as data already in ImmPort. ImmPort supports analysis of flow cytometry results and HLA genetic associations, as well as a range of interactive graphics for visualizing data from different immunological assays.
Data housed in ImmPort can be found in generic search engines such as Google as well as specialized biomedical discovery engines like the NIAID Data Ecosystem Discovery Portal, FHIR Research Data Finder, National Library of Medicine Dataset Catalog, Vivli, and others.
The team behind ImmPort has always aimed to facilitate open access to multiple data types, said ImmPort principal investigator Atul Butte, M.D., Ph.D., the Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg Distinguished Professor at the University of California, San Francisco.
"[We are] so thrilled to still be working on that original NIAID vision — that open data can enable so much more [discovery]," said Dr. Butte.
Learn more about ImmPort and visit ImmPort.org.