immunarch.com

What it is

immunarch is an open-source R toolkit maintained by the ImmunoMind team. It is designed for Adaptive Immune Receptor Repertoire (AIRR) data analysis, covering immunorepertoire use cases such as TCR/BCR, bulk sequencing, and single-cell V(D)J. It emphasizes reproducible analysis pipelines, multimodal immune-data integration, and applications in immunotherapy, vaccine design, and biomarker discovery.

Core capabilities

Based on the documentation, immunarch offers a fairly comprehensive feature set. It supports statistics at both the receptor and repertoire levels, including V/J gene usage, diversity, clonality, sample overlap, public clonotypes, clonotype tracking across samples and time points, k-mer and sequence motif analysis, BCR pipelines, and publication-ready visualization. It also highlights the ability to convert receptor-, sample-, and cohort-level metrics and annotations into machine-learning-ready feature tables. On the data side, it supports inputs such as MiXCR, 10x Genomics, single-cell data, and paired-chain data, and uses immundata to handle large datasets, including datasets that exceed memory limits. Technically, it is primarily aimed at R users, providing function families, an API reference, and extension APIs for adding new analyses and metrics.

Pricing and open source

The project is licensed under Apache-2.0. The software itself is free, and the documentation explicitly permits commercial use. However, enterprise users do not automatically receive priority support. For priority support, data-pipeline setup, training, consulting, or multi-omics / machine-learning system design, users need to contact the authors; no public pricing is disclosed.

Pros and cons

Its strengths are its clear domain focus, broad coverage of the main AIRR analysis workflow, natural integration with the R ecosystem, and documentation that includes installation, troubleshooting, data loading, analysis tutorials, migration guides, and a reference section, making it friendly to reproducible research. The drawbacks are also clear: the project is moving toward 1.0 and is described as “undergoing huge changes,” so production pipelines need to pay attention to version pinning and migration risks. In addition, regular commercial users do not receive priority support, and teams that do not use R will face a learning curve.

Who it is for and access from China

immunarch is suitable for immunorepertoire researchers, bioinformatics teams, immunotherapy and vaccine R&D teams, and users who need to build features from AIRR data for downstream statistics or machine learning. For access from China, the documentation does not provide network or payment information. Since installation is recommended via GitHub/pak, the actual experience may depend on local connectivity to GitHub, CRAN, and dependency repositories. Users in China should test in advance or configure mirrors where appropriate. Alternative or complementary tools include scRepertoire, VDJtools, downstream MiXCR workflows, and the Immcantation ecosystem.