A new test could diagnose autoimmune diseases faster

Each time you get sick, your physique retains a document of it.

It does so via your immune system, an enormous military of cells that mobilizes to combat off ailments. And after the an infection is over — if it’s ever over — a few of these cells nonetheless float via you, a document of what you’ve been via, ready for the following time you encounter that illness.

We now have plenty of instruments to diagnose ailments, however what bothered Maxim Zaslavsky, a genetics and laptop science postdoctoral researcher at Stanford, is that these instruments don’t make a lot use of the immune system’s built-in information of illness exposures: B and T cells.