The team members used machine learning to find correlations between these measurements and health, allowing them to create an immune health score for each of the volunteers. They call it the immune health metric, or IHM.
When they used this approach to find the immune scores of people who had already volunteered in other studies, they found that the IHM seemed to align with other measures of health, such as how people respond to diseases, treatments, and vaccines. The study was published in the journal Nature Medicine last year.
The researchers behind it hope that a test like this could one day help identify people who are at risk of cancer and other diseases, or explain why some people respond differently to treatments or immunizations.
But the test isn’t ready for clinical use. If, like me, you’re finding yourself curious to know your own IHM, you’ll just have to wait.
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.
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