About Us

Our Story

iReceptor Genomic Services (iRGS) offers data curation/sharing, data discovery/integration, and data analysis services for high-throughput and single-cell sequencing data from the Adaptive Immune Receptor Repertoire (AIRR-seq data). Since the introduction of high-throughput sequencing in 2009, AIRR-seq data has been key to understanding the healthy adaptive immune system, understanding the immune response to pathogens and auto-immune disease, and guiding the development of vaccines and antibody therapies.

The iRGS team are leaders in the AIRR Community and have extensive experience developing and working with the AIRR Community standards promoting Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) AIRR-seq data in the AIRR Data Commons (ADC)

The History of iReceptor

Antibodies/B-cell receptors and T-cell receptors have to be immensely diverse to recognize and remove all of the pathogens the body is exposed to, including novel viruses such as COVID-19. Modern sequencing technology has allowed us to characterize this diversity in exquisite detail, leading to advances in vaccines, monoclonal antibodies and other immunotherapies and diagnostics. The AIRR Community formed in 2015 to develop a set of protocols and standards for curating, analyzing and sharing these Adaptive Immune Receptor Repertoires (AIRR-seq) data in a set of distributed repositories called the AIRR Data Commons.

The iReceptor project, as an open source research initiative, was established in 2014. Based out of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, the project has developed two key components: 1) the iReceptor Gateway, a web based user interface for researchers to find, integrate, and analyze AIRR-seq data from the ADC, and 2) the iReceptor Turnkey Repository, an open source downloadable AIRR standards compliant repository software stack that implements a standalone ADC repository. The original iReceptor paper (Corrie et al.) was published in 2018 and has been heavily cited as a platform for curating, sharing, finding, and analyzing AIRR-seq data. The iReceptor team have been leaders in the AIRR Community since its inception, with iRGS Scientific Director Dr. Felix Breden, the Founding Chair of the AIRR-C Executive, iRGS Technical Director Dr. Brian Corrie, the Co-lead of the AIRR Common Repository Working Group, and iRGS Managing Director Pam Borghardt, the AIRR-C Executive Director.

iReceptor Genomics Services (iRGS), established in early 2024, is a spin-off, service based company from the iReceptor research project. Leveraging the expertise developed from ten years of developing the iReceptor platform, iRGS offers services to researchers, research organizations, and industry in curating, sharing, integrating, and analyzing AIRR-seq data.