Immune Ageing

Understanding how our immune systems age could help us stay healthier for longer.

As we grow older, our immune systems change. This can leave us more vulnerable to infections and cancer and make vaccines less effective. Ageing also affects men and women differently: women are more likely to develop autoimmune diseases, while men are more susceptible to some infections and cancers. Yet we still do not have a detailed picture of how healthy immunity changes over a lifetime, or what drives these differences.

Part of the answer may lie in the remarkable variety of receptors our immune cells use to recognise threats. Each of us carries millions of different versions, creating a highly individual picture of what our immune system is equipped to recognise and fight. This diversity changes with age, but scientists do not yet understand those changes at a population scale.

The Oxford Martin Programme on Immune Ageing will investigate how immunity changes with age and differs between men and women. Using existing samples from healthy people across a wide range of ages, the team aims to analyse millions of pairs of immune receptors, creating what would be the largest dataset of its kind. 

By comparing these millions of immune receptors, the team will look for patterns associated with age and sex, and investigate what they can tell us about the decline in immune function as we get older. The work could help explain why people vary in their ability to fight infection and respond to vaccines, and shed light on differences in disease risk between men and women.

In the longer term, the work could change how we think about ageing itself. A person’s immune system may not age at the same rate as the rest of their body. By learning what healthy immune ageing looks like, scientists hope eventually to identify an individual’s “immune age” and investigate whether it can reveal increased risk of disease before symptoms appear. That could open the way to earlier action to help people stay healthier for longer.