Shen-Orr Shai S
Department of Immunology, Rappaport Institute of Medical Research, Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel.
Rambam Maimonides Med J. 2012 Oct 31;3(4):e0023. doi: 10.5041/RMMJ.10090. Print 2012 Oct.
The immune system is critical for protection and health maintenance and is likely required for a long lifespan. Yet, despite its importance for health, the ability to assess its quality of function has been poor, nor is much known on its variation between individuals. Hence direct assessment of immune health has largely been missing from medicine, and metrics of immune health are not well defined, especially in non-extreme states. This is chiefly due to the high complexity of the immune system. Recently emerging technologies now enable broad surveying of many immune system components at high resolution, setting forth a transformation of immunology and, through it, medicine. Such technologies enable, for the first time, high-resolution monitoring of an individual's immune system. The resulting information can be used for diagnostic and prognostic purposes, as well as to provide a quantitative, global view of the immune system, i.e. "systems immunology." This is especially relevant in the context of aging, in which the immune system exhibits profound alterations in state and function.
免疫系统对于保护身体和维持健康至关重要，并且可能是长寿所必需的。然而，尽管其对健康很重要，但评估其功能质量的能力一直很差，而且对于个体之间的差异也知之甚少。因此，医学上很大程度上一直缺乏对免疫健康的直接评估，免疫健康指标也没有得到很好的定义，尤其是在非极端状态下。这主要是由于免疫系统的高度复杂性。最近出现的技术现在能够以高分辨率广泛检测许多免疫系统成分，从而引发了免疫学乃至医学的变革。此类技术首次实现了对个体免疫系统的高分辨率监测。所得到的信息可用于诊断和预后目的，还能提供免疫系统的定量、全局视图，即“系统免疫学”。这在衰老背景下尤为重要，因为免疫系统在状态和功能上会出现深刻变化。
