Classification of the Universe of Immune Epitope Literature: Representation and Knowledge Gaps

Background

A significant fraction of the more than 18 million scientific articlescurrently indexed in the PubMed database are related to immune responses tovarious agents, including infectious microbes, autoantigens, allergens,transplants, cancer antigens and others. The Immune Epitope Database (IEDB)is an online repository that catalogs immune epitope reactivity data derivedfrom articles listed in the National Library of Medicine PubMed database.The IEDB is maintained and continually updated by monitoring PubMed for new,potentially relevant references.

Methodology

Herein we detail the classification of all epitope-specific literature inover 100 different immunological domains representing Infectious Diseasesand Microbes, Autoimmunity, Allergy, Transplantation and Cancer. Therelative number of references in each category reflects past and presentareas of research on immune reactivities. In addition to describing theoverall landscape of data distribution, this particular characterization ofthe epitope reference data also allows for the exploration of possiblecorrelations with global disease morbidity and mortality data.

Conclusions/Significance

While in most cases diseases associated with high morbidity and mortalityrates were amongst the most studied, a number of high impact diseases suchas dengue, Schistosoma, HSV-2, B. pertussis and Chlamydia trachoma, werefound to have very little coverage. The data analyzed in this fashionrepresents the first estimate of how reported immunological data correspondsto disease-related morbidity and mortality, and confirms significantdiscrepancies in the overall research foci versus disease burden, thusidentifying important gaps to be pursued by future research. These findingsmay also provide a justification for redirecting a portion of research fundsinto some of the underfunded, critical disease areas.