Escrivà-Font Joan, Cao Tianze, Consiglio Camila Rosat
Oxf Open Immunol. 2025 Jul 4;6(1):iqaf006. doi: 10.1093/oxfimm/iqaf006. eCollection 2025.
Immune function varies widely across humans. Biological sex is a key factor underlying human immune variability, with men presenting with more severe infections and increased cancer rates, while women exhibit higher vaccine responses and prevalence of autoimmunity. Intrinsic biological sex differences arise from varying contributions of chromosomal sex, and sex hormone sensing and downstream signaling to different cell types. This complex regulation presents a unique opportunity for the exploration of human immune sex differences using systems-level methods of investigation. Here we analyze the current literature and the applications of systems immunology in elucidating the immune sex differences in humans. We examine mechanisms of biological sex modulation of human immunity via sex chromosomes, and particularly emphasize the role of sex hormones. We then focus on how systems immunology has been advancing our understanding of how sex impacts the healthy immune system at steady state, ranging from cell composition, transcriptomics, epigenomics, metabolomics, spatial and cell-cell interactions, to plasma proteomics. We also examine systems-level applications to investigating sex differences upon immune perturbations and give an overview of key future directions for the field. Systems immunology provides a powerful framework to decode biological sex-regulated pathways in immunity, paving the way for more precise, sex-informed therapeutic interventions to address sex differences in immune-related conditions.
人类的免疫功能差异很大。生理性别是人类免疫差异的一个关键因素,男性更容易感染严重疾病且癌症发病率更高,而女性则表现出更高的疫苗反应率和自身免疫患病率。内在的生理性别差异源于染色体性别、性激素感知以及不同细胞类型的下游信号传导的不同贡献。这种复杂的调节为使用系统水平的研究方法探索人类免疫性别差异提供了独特的机会。在这里,我们分析了当前的文献以及系统免疫学在阐明人类免疫性别差异方面的应用。我们研究了通过性染色体调节人类免疫的生理性别机制,特别强调了性激素的作用。然后,我们关注系统免疫学如何增进我们对性别在稳态下如何影响健康免疫系统的理解,范围从细胞组成、转录组学、表观基因组学、代谢组学、空间和细胞间相互作用到血浆蛋白质组学。我们还研究了系统水平在研究免疫扰动时的性别差异方面的应用,并概述了该领域未来的关键方向。系统免疫学提供了一个强大的框架来解码免疫中生理性别调节的途径,为更精确、考虑性别的治疗干预铺平道路,以解决免疫相关疾病中的性别差异。
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