Systems approaches to studying the immune response in tuberculosis

•Blood transcriptional profiling in human TB has been reproducible in many studies.•Transcriptional profiling has highlighted the importance of type I interferons in TB.•Transcriptional profiles provide biomarkers for diagnosis and treatment monitoring.

Tuberculosis (TB) remains a disease of considerable mortality and morbidity. Studies employing microarrays to derive transcriptional profiles of the host response during TB, which combined with data from experimental systems have highlighted a potentially detrimental role for type I interferons during infection, with important implications for vaccine and therapeutic development. In addition, these studies have provided candidate biomarkers which may advance diagnosis and treatment monitoring. These studies thus exemplify the promise of a systems biology approach to study complex infectious disease such as TB.