About ITI
The Institute for Immunity, Transplantation and Infection seeks to leverage decades of leadership at Stanford in these areas to achieve a new level of understanding and patient care. There has been an explosion of information in recent years that could be very productively applied to a new generation of treatments for some of the most serious diseases of our time, including autoimmunity, infectious diseases, cancer and organ failure requiring transplantation.
We aim to cut across traditional boundaries to foster multidisciplinary teams of investigators to target major diseases from "soup to nuts" that is, to cover every aspect, from the most basic to the most clinical. In this way, teams of experts can pool their knowledge and strategize about the most promising new ways to detect, prevent and treat immune-mediated and infectious diseases and prevent organ rejection.
Objectives
- Developing more powerful vaccines for old and new threats
- Reenergizing the immune system
- Eliminating chronic autoimmune diseases
- Revolutionizing transplantation
Another major effort of the Institute is to investigate in much greater detail than ever before attempted the immune status of individuals, both healthy and immune impaired or overactive (e.g. autoimmunity or allergies). By identifying markers that could tell us how a particular person's immune system is functioning, we could both understand immune system-related and infectious diseases better and formulate new and more efficatious interventions. Charged with carrying out this mission is our Human Immune Monitoring Center.
We also seek to enhance educational opportunities for students at all levels, and our particular model is this respect is the Center for Clinical Immunology at Stanford, which has developed some wonderful educational programs for students and fellows.