Researchers from the University of Oxford's Department of Statistics will help investigate how the immune system changes with age, as part of a new £1 million interdisciplinary research programme funded by the Oxford Martin School.   

Professor Charlotte Deane, Professor of Structural Bioinformatics in the Department of Statistics, will be a Director of the new Oxford Martin Programme on Immune Ageing, alongside Professor John Frater from the Nuffield Department of Medicine and Professor Dirk Aarts from the Department of Chemistry. Dr Matthew Raybould, also from the Department of Statistics, will join the programme as an Oxford Martin Fellow. 

The three-year programme aims to build a better understanding of how healthy immune systems change throughout our lives, including why immune ageing differs between men and women. 

Professor Deane said: ‘Our immune system protects us; understanding how it evolves with age is a hugely important problem. I am so excited to be part of the team and bring the Oxford Protein Informatics Group’s experience in curating, analysing, and training machine learning models to this problem.’ 

As we grow older, our immune systems become less effective at protecting us against infections and cancer, and our responses to vaccines can weaken. However, scientists still lack a detailed understanding of how these changes develop across a lifetime. 

One important area of investigation is the diversity of immune receptors, the molecules that enable immune cells to recognise potential threats. Each person has millions of different receptors, and their composition changes with age. 

Using existing samples from healthy individuals across a wide range of ages, the research team aims to analyse millions of pairs of immune receptors, creating what would be the largest dataset of its kind. 

By identifying patterns associated with age and sex, the researchers hope to understand more about the changes in immune function that occur as people grow older, and why individuals differ in their responses to infections and vaccines. 

Professor Deane leads the Oxford Protein Informatics Group (OPIG), based in the Department of Statistics, which develops computational approaches to understanding biological systems. The group's expertise in statistics, artificial intelligence and protein informatics will contribute to the programme's interdisciplinary approach. 

Dr Matthew Raybould said: ‘Our effort will call upon the full suite of immunoinformatics tools that OPIG and others have built over the past decade. We also hope the sheer quantity of data yielded will underpin the first “immune age” biometric based on receptor repertoire profiling.’ 

Such a measure could help researchers understand how an individual's immune age differs from their chronological age. In the longer term, this could potentially help identify people at increased risk of disease before symptoms develop, providing opportunities for earlier intervention. 

The Oxford Martin Programme on Immune Ageing is one of four new research programmes announced by the Oxford Martin School in October 2026, bringing together researchers from different disciplines to address major challenges in health, climate and the environment. 
 
Find out more: Oxford Martin Programme on Immune Ageing