Highlights
- • Engineers can impact biomedical research and health care by leveraging their expertise and toolboxes.
- • Systems immunology plays a key role in dissecting molecular interactions in human diseases and guiding immune engineering.
- • Immune engineering bears a tremendous potential in the fight against cancer, infections, and autoimmune diseases.
The smallpox vaccine represents the earliest attempt in engineering immunity. The recent success of chimeric antigen receptor T cells (CAR-T cells) in cancer once again demonstrates the clinical potential of immune engineering. Inspired by this success, diverse approaches have been used to boost various aspects of immunity: engineering dendritic cells (DCs), natural killer (NK) cells, T cells, antibodies, cytokines, small peptides, and others. With recent development of various high-throughput technologies (of which engineers, especially biomedical engineers/bioengineers contributed significantly), such as immune repertoire sequencing, and analytical methods, a systems level of understanding immunity (or the lack of it) beyond model animals has provided critical insights into the human immune system. This review focuses on recent progressed made in systems biology and the engineering of adaptive immunity.