Aging and the immune system
April 10, 2026
New research untangles massive datasets to build tools, uncover clues on how we age
WHAT’S THE STUDY: A team of University of Michigan experts in biostatistics, public health, medical research and population studies has received a grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health, to develop advanced statistical and computational methods for analyzing immune data to enhance our understanding of the immune system’s role in aging and age-related diseases.
WHY IT MATTERS: The more we know about aging, the more disease, health care costs and suffering may be prevented. One thing that we know about aging is that the immune system holds powerful clues. Those clues are contained in massive data sets such as the landmark Health and Retirement Study. However, that data needs to be analyzed, untangled and translated—or denoised—into usable knowledge that will help make more sense of the immune system triggers on aging.
The new research will develop methods to uncover immune signatures in elderly people and clarify the relationship with age-related decline and disease—and make those methods available on an open-source software for other researchers and health care professionals to access. Altogether, the research is expected to deliver powerful tools for immune data analysis and transformative insights into the interplay between immunity and aging.
HOW MUCH AND FOR HOW LONG: The grant, worth about $1.3 million, runs for five years.
WHO IS INVOLVED:
Gen Li is an associate professor of biostatistics at the School of Public Health.
“The immune system plays a critical role in aging and many aging-related diseases. By understanding immune markers—and how they relate to aging outcomes—we can gain new insight into why some people remain healthier longer than others,” he said.
“Fortunately, resources such as the Health and Retirement Study provide rich immune and cytokine data at an unprecedented scale, but we still lack the right tools to fully harness their potential. Our goal is to develop transparent, interpretable machine-learning tools that can separate true biological signals from noise and reveal immune patterns linked to healthier—or riskier—aging trajectories.”
Grace Noppert is a research assistant professor at the Survey Research Center and faculty associate at Population Studies Center.
“We tend to think of aging as something that’s driven by time alone, but the immune system doesn’t behave that way. People of the same age can have very different immune profiles—and very different risks for disease,” she said. The challenge is that this is incredibly difficult to measure at the population level because the immune system is complex and noisy.
“What’s novel and important about this work is that it moves us beyond relying on one or two biomarkers to represent the entire immune system. Instead, we’re taking a more systems-level approach, bringing together multiple immune measures to better understand how the immune system ages—and why some people remain healthier than others.”
Muneesh Tewari is the Ray and Ruth Anderson-Laurence M. Sprague Memorial Research Professor and professor of internal medicine and of biomedical engineering.
“This project is so important because it will create data analysis tools that will help researchers understand how aging affects the immune system in a much more integrative and reliable way,” he said.
Contact: Kim North Shine, [email protected]