The growth ''boom'' of immunomics. While the growth boom in genomics took place in the 1990s and this field has now begun to enter a mature stage of development, a similar growth boom in immunomics is likely to take place over the remaining years of the current decade. We recently searched the PubMed database (with Sente 2.3) using the following query: ''immunomics OR immunomic OR immunome OR (antigen AND microarray AND functional) OR (epitope AND microarray).'' After removing nine irrelevant articles from the output list and adding five articles for the new journal Immunome Research, we obtained a list of 71 articles covering the years from 1999 to the present (please see Figure 1 ). It is clear that interest in this field has accelerated, supporting the expectation of a continuing boom in growth. It is expected that the number of publications will increase at an exponential pace as immunomic microarrays became commercially available for research use. As immunomic array technology evolves, we expect that immunomic arrays with a small number of features will eventually be designed for specific clinical diagnostic purposes and used regularly in medical practice. However, these clinical applications might still be in the distant future.