Hello, World
So, we started a company.
The name is IMBER BIO, and if you’re wondering—yes, “imber” is Latin for rain. Specifically, a rain shower. We liked the imagery: billions of immune cells, each one a droplet carrying information, falling together to form something you can actually measure. Also, all the good English names were taken.
The Elevator Pitch (If Your Elevator Is Very Slow)
Here’s the thing about the adaptive immune system: it’s essentially the most sophisticated biological surveillance system ever evolved. Your T cells and B cells are out there right now, keeping meticulous records of everything your body has encountered—every pathogen, every allergen, every autoantigen your immune system has decided to pick a fight with.
The problem? We’ve been terrible at reading those records.
For decades, immunology has been largely descriptive. We observe what the immune system does. We categorize. We give things Greek names. We’re very good at explaining what happened after the fact. What we’re not so good at is prediction.
That’s what we’re here to change.
Our Mission
Make adaptive immunology a predictive science.
That’s it. That’s the tweet.
If we do our jobs right, physicians won’t just diagnose autoimmune disease after years of symptoms and accumulated damage. They’ll see it coming. They’ll catch the immune signature of disease while there’s still time to intervene—maybe before irreversible damage even begins.
Why Now?
A few things have converged:
- Sequencing got cheap. Like, really cheap. The kind of cheap where you can actually profile immune repertoires at scale without needing a small country’s GDP.
- Computational tools got better. Including some that our team built. (Shameless plug: check out scRepertoire if you’re into single-cell immune analysis.)
- We finally understand enough. Decades of basic immunology research have given us the foundation. We know what to look for. Now we need to look.
What’s Next
We’re building. Quietly, for now.
We’re assembling a team of people who think the immune system is the most interesting thing in biology (because it is). We’re developing technologies. We’re establishing collaborations.
If any of this resonates—if you’re a researcher interested in collaboration, a clinician frustrated by diagnostic uncertainty, or an investor who thinks predictive immunology sounds like a reasonable bet—we’d love to hear from you.
In the meantime, we’ll be here. Reading immune repertoires. One T cell at a time.
print("Hello, World")
# → Disease signature: detected