At last, it is being acknowledged that women’s immune systems are different to men’s! Women get more autoimmune disease, women respond differently to infection; cancers and heart diseases behave differently in men and women because of differences in their immune systems. This means that treatments that have been developed for one sex may not work in the other. It also means that many aspects of women’s immune mediated health have not been researched with the same interest and vigour as the health of men or mice!
Many of us at Trinity College Dublin, RCSI and NUIMaynooth together with colleagues in MIT and Harvard have had a long standing shared interest in this field. Together we are now organising a conference on ‘Sex Differences in the Immune System’ to be held in Trinity College Dublin in June 2024 to explore this important issue. We are bringing together some of the best researchers in the world and Ireland, to share their knowledge and discoveries, to identify the major gaps that remain to be explored and the directions research should now take. To open the conference, we aim to have a public discussion of the key issues and challenges, so that public opinion might influence research priorities and funding in this area. A panel of some of our most prestigious speakers including our own Professor Rose Ann Kenny of TILDA and Eleanor Molloy Professor of Paediatrics at Trinity College Dublin, together with student researchers and members of relevant patient groups will discuss with the audience, major problems and barriers facing the field and try to identify the directions that research should now take. To close the conference, Nick Lane from UCL, the world famous science communicator and expert on the evolution of sex, has agreed to summarise the most exciting findings and thoughts.