Stanford School of Medicine
Institute for Immunity Transplantation and Infection–

ITI News

September '08 - Dean Pizzo approved the appointment of two new Associate Directors for ITI: Garry Fathman, MD, representing autoimmune diseases, and Gary Schoolnik, MD, in the area of infectious diseases.  Garry Fathman has been involved with ITI since its inception and this nomination formalizes all that he has done over the years to unify and strengthen clinical immunology through the Center of Clinical Immunology at Stanford, which he founded with Carol and Harry Saal.  The other Associate Director is Gary Schoolnik known as one of the world's preeminent infectious disease experts, especially with respect to underdeveloped countries.  Currently, he is partnering with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to fight tuberculosis, which kills nearly two million people each year.

September 23, 2008 - Mark Genovese, Associate Professor of Medicine (Immunology and Rheumatology) will receive the Kunkel Young Investigator Award from the American College of Rheumatology at its national meeting in late October.

August 25, 2008 - Stanford - INFECTIONS LINKED TO PREMATURE BIRTHS MORE COMMON THAN THOUGHT, STANFORD STUDY FINDS
Previously unrecognized and unidentified infections of amniotic fluid may be a significant cause of premature birth, according to researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine.  An analysis of amniotic fluid from women in preterm labor indicated that 15 percent of the fluid samples harbored bacteria or fungi - an increase of 50 percent over previous estimates. The heavier the burden of infection, the more likely the women were to deliver younger, sicker infants.   "If we could prevent these infections in the first place, or detect them sooner, we might one day be able to prevent some of these premature births," said research associate Dan DiGiulio, MD, who conducted the study in the laboratory of senior author David Relman, MD. About 12 percent of all births in this country are premature and the frequency of premature birth is increasing.[Full story]

August 18, 2008 - Stanford - Embryonic stem cells trigger an immune response in mice, researchers from the Stanford University School of Medicine report. The finding suggests that the effectiveness of human therapies derived from the cells could be limited unless ways are found to dampen the rejection response.[...]
“It’s getting harder and harder to believe that these cells are immunoprivileged,” said Joseph Wu, MD, PhD, assistant professor of cardiovascular medicine and of radiology. “In fact, the rejection of these cells confirms our suspicions that they do cause an immune response.”
Embryonic stem cells form all cells in an embryo. Many researchers have suggested that these cells may receive a kind of “free pass” from the normally vigilant immune system in order to allow the growth of a fetus that contains both maternal and paternal genetic material. Such an immunological exemption could alleviate many concerns about using cells for therapy that don’t exactly match the recipient’s immune system—such as existing embryonic stem cell lines that are not directly derived from the recipient.
“We all want to know what’s going to happen if you transplant these stem cells into a person,” said Mark Davis, MD, PhD, the Burt and Marion Avery Family Professor and professor of microbiology and immunology. But because unmodified embryonic stem cells can cause cancer, the researchers transplanted the cells into mice rather than people. [Full Story]

August 12, 2008 - The Australian --Transplant patients may soon go steroid-free
A steroid-free drug regimen for kidney transplant recipients appears to be effective. Minnie Sarwal, associate professor of pediatrics with Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, led the research and is presenting her findings at a transplantation conference in Australia. [Full story]

July 18, 2008 - Doctors Research Treatments fro Lupus.
For decades, doctors have been struggling to treat a debilitating disease that affects more than a million Americans, most of them women. The disease is lupus. But now Bay Area researchers may be closing in on the first new treatment for the disease in nearly half a century. [...] Researchers at Stanford University believe they may be close to new and effective treatments for the disease. In fact, it is the first truly new treatment for lupus in decades. "My personal goal, what I would like to see is to pick up these patients before they're patients, when we know there might be a high risk of developing the disease and try to cure them up front," said Dr. Paul Utz from Stanford University. Full Story

"My personal goal, what I would like to see is to pick up these patients before they're patients, when we know there might be a high risk of developing the disease and try to cure them up front," said Dr. Paul Utz from Stanford University.

June 18, 2008 - Researchers use math to predict how fast cells move.
Tiny motions of molecules can shape whole cells and determine whether they race around or crawl, according to School of Medicine researchers who have used mathematics to model cell movement for the first time. The researchers mathematically modeled the inner forces that morph and move cells by studying fish cells that trek through skin to heal wounds. Linking a whole cell's shape and movement to its molecular engines provides a foundation for researching important moving cells in humans, such as creeping cancer cells or rearranging cells in growing embryos, said Julie Theriot, PhD, associate professor of biochemistry and art of microbiology and immunology. (Full story)

June 3, 2008 - Young organ transplant patients can thrive without toxic anti-rejection drugs, Stanford/Packard study shows.  The novel approach abandons the long-held practice of using steroid drugs to tamp down the transplant recipient’s immune system. Omitting steroids avoids the problems of growth suppression, high blood pressure and rapid weight gain that go hand-in-hand with long-term use of the drugs. Instead, the treatment relies on the extended use of a different type of immune-suppressing medication, called daclizumab. The effect of the change on children in the study, some of whom were followed as long as eight years, is evident on many fronts.  We are seeing children grow as they were meant to grow,” said pediatric nephrologist Minnie Sarwal, MD, PhD, who devised the treatment in 1998. “Not only that, their organs are performing better and are less likely to be rejected.” [Full Story]

June 2, 2008 - Lucy Shapiro has been elected to the board of directors of Gen-Probe Inc. Shapiro is the Virginia and D.K. Ludwig professor of cancer research, associate chair of the Department of Developmental Biology, and director of the Beckman Center for Molecular and Genetic Medicine at Stanford University’s School of Medicine.

May 6, 2008, New York Times, Redefining Disease, Genes and All
Duchenne muscular dystrophy may not seem to have much in common with heart attacks. One is a rare inherited disease that primarily strikes boys.  The other is a common cause of death in both men and women.  To Atul J. Butte, they are suprisingly similar. Dr. Butte, an assistant professor of medicine at Stanford, is among a growing band of researchers trying to redefine how diseases are classified — by looking not at their symptoms or physiological measurements, but at their genetic underpinnings. It turns out that a similar set of genes is active in boys with Duchenne and adults who have heart attacks. The research is already starting to change nosology, as the field of disease classification is known. Seemingly dissimilar diseases are being lumped together. What were thought to be single diseases are being split into separate ailments. Just as they once mapped the human genome, scientists are trying to map the “diseasome,” the collection of all diseases and the genes associated with them. This article discusses Butte's research and includes a photo.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/06/health/research/06dise.html? (registration required)

On April 29, 2008 the National Academy of Sciences elected five Stanford professors to its ranks, among them was Dr. Ronald Levy, the Robert K. and Helen K. Summy Professor in the School of Medicine, Chief of the Oncology Division.

On April 24 and 25, 2008 more than 200 people converged to the Clark Auditorium to attend the ITI Symposium on Basic Mechanisms in Immunity and Infection organized by Professor Hugh McDevitt. Speakers from Stanford, Harvard, MIT, the University of Washington, the University of Paris and Genentech highlighted several major advances in the understanding of the  genes and gene products which comprise the immune system and its normal response to foreign invaders and its aberrant response  in auto immune diseases.  The symposium was part of the Stanford School of Medicine Centennial week. See schedule here.

April 21, 2008 - Dr. Lucy Shapiro, the Virginia and DK Ludwig Professor of Developmental Biology and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies has been awarded the Charles and Martha Hitchcock Professorship for 2008-09 by the University of California (UC). Since it was established nearly a century ago, the Hitchcock Professorship has become one of the most distinguished endowments at UC and has featured a number of distinguished past winners such as Neils Bohr, Robert Oppenheimer, Noam Chomsky and Steven Chu.

April 20, 2008, Stanford — Chronic inflammation triggers bone marrow-derived blood cells to travel to the brain and fuse with a certain type of neuron up to 100 times more frequently than previously believed, according to a new study from the Stanford University School of Medicine. [...]
“This finding was totally unprecedented and unexpected,” said senior author Helen Blau, PhD, the Donald E. and Delia B. Baxter Professor and director of the Baxter Laboratory in Genetic Pharmacology. Please click HERE for the full story.

On March 1, 2008 the Institute for Immunity, Transplantation and Infection (ITI) awarded for the first time eight seed grants to faculty members in the School of Medicine. Each will receive $50K per year, for two years. The proposals selected for funding were interdisciplinary, disease focused and will make use of the newly established Human Immune Monitoring Center. The funding was gratefully provided by Dean Pizzo, the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center for Molecular and Genetic Medicine, and Dr. Galli from the Mary Hewitt Loveless Foundation for a proposal on a fatal allergic disease.  The winners are:

March 16, 2008 - Doctors may one day be able to detect early stages of colon cancer without a biopsy, using a new technique developed by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. This imaging technology is one of many new ways of detecting cancers in the body in real time, said Christopher Contag, PhD, associate professor of pediatrics and of microbiology and of immunology, who led the study. Contag said he hoped it might be one of the first to be used routinely for early detection of cancer. “Detecting colon cancers is just the first step,” said Contag. He predicted similar techniques will eventually be able to find a wide range of cancers, monitor cancer treatment, and deliver chemotherapies directly to cancerous cells in the colon, stomach, mouth and skin. The study is published online in Nature Medicine.  [full story]

February 26, 2008 - A dozen guests, including community leaders and bio-tech professionals, visited the new Human Immune Monitoring Center (HIMC) for a tour led by Mark Davis, PhD, Director of the Institute for Immunity, Transplantation and Infection, and David Hirschberg, PhD, Director of the Center.  After Dr. Davis shared his broad vision for the Center with the guests, Dr. Hirschberg described how the technologies assembled there should enable immunologists to understand the human immune system, to predict when autoimmune diseases may flare up, and to treat those diseases with much greater effectiveness. 

The HIMC was launched last year with a generous gift from the Hedco Foundation.

February 17, 2008 - Stanford researchers find protein targets for potential treatment of multiple sclerosis. Multiple sclerosis is not a single condition, but an ebbing and flowing of stages affecting the body's central nervous system. Recognizing that pattern, researchers from the Stanford University School of Medicine have identified therapy targets that could lead to personalized treatments for patients at each phase of the illness. Essentially, the team cataloged all of the brain-tissue proteins that they found were distinct to three discrete stages of multiple sclerosis  "This is a gold mine," said Lawrence Steinman, MD, professor of neurology and neurological sciences. "Knowing what proteins are most important at a discrete stage of the multiple sclerosis process is the first step toward being able to 'personalize' treatment."        Steinman, whose team worked with researchers at the University of Connecticut Health Center, is one of two senior authors of the article that will be published in the Feb. 17 issue of the journal Nature. (click here for full article)

January 24, 2008 - New England Journal of Medicine, Larry Kowalski has been able to live two years free of immunosuppressive drugs thanks to researchesr at the Stanford School of Medicine.  The technique they developed is based on 25 years of research by Samuel Strober, MD, professor of immunology and rheumatology. The therapy was first developed in mice by Strober, the senior author of the study. In the last few years, Strober worked with Robert Lowsky, MD, associate professor of blood and marrow transplantation, to adapt this strategy from mice for human lymphoma and leukemia patients. The procedure combines localized blasts of irradiation and antibody treatments to tweak the recipient's immune cells. Then the recipient gets an infusion of blood cells from the donor. The procedure boosts levels of a type of immune cell called regulatory T cells. These cells function as the immune system's "peacekeepers" and can avert the attack that causes rejection. The journal issue also includes two reports from other research groups, describing their efforts to achieve organ transplantation without long-term immunosuppressive drugs.

January 16, 2008 - John Boothroyd, Professor, Microbioloty & Immunology, is the recipient of the Leuckart Medal from the German Society for Parasitology.  The medal is to be presented to Dr. Boothroyd during the annual meeting of the Society, this year held at the Bernhard-Nocht-Institute in Hamburg on March 5 -7, 2008.

January 2008, Edgar Engleman, Medical Director of the Stanford Blood Center, discusses his research involving the use of a special type of white blood cell as a treatment for cancer. Engleman, who is also a professor of pathology at the Stanford School of Medicine, and his team of researchers have been interested in dendritic cells, or DCs, which can provoke an immune response in the body. (click here for MEDCAST)

Immune System Cascade may prune brain synapses, for better or worse (Stanford Report, 1/9/2008)
In this article, Mitzi Baker talks about how School of Medicine researchers have now discovered how a growing child's brain begins to pare down neurons and connections until it develops into the streamlined brain of an adult.  Ben Barres, MD, Phd, professor of neurobiology, and his lab have found the sculptor behind that process: the immune system. (click here for article)

On December 13 and 14, 2007, ITI held its very first Symposium on Immune Monitoring at the Clark Auditorium.  It was a very interesting symposium with an excellent group of speakers.  See the agenda here.  Some presentations will be available here soon.

On November 12, 2007 doctors at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital successfully separated 2-year-old twin girls from Costa Rica who were conjoined at the chest and abdomen. ITI Associate Director, Carlos Esquivel, the Arnold and Barbara Silverman Professor in Pediatric Transplantation worked to separate the girls' livers. (click here for article)

On November 2, 2007 the division of blood and marrow transplantation (BMT) will be celebrating their 20th anniversary. They have transplanted more than 3400 patients since the program's inception and will likely reach 3500 on or around the anniversary date.

October 14, 2007: Blood test takes step toward predicting Alzheimer's. A team lead by Tony Wyss-Coray, PhD, associate professor of neurology and neurological sciences and senior author of the study, has developed a blood test that ia a step toward giving people an answer two to six years before the onset of the disease. (for the full article go to this URL)

On September 26 the Human Immune Monitoring Center (HIMC) celebrated its grand opening at its new location in CCSR in the School of Medicine.  It was also an opportunity to thank the generous donors to the HIMC:  the HEDCO Foundation, the Sidney Frank Foundation and the Becton Dickinson Corp.  The new lab is now open for business, providing a "one-stop-shopping" for a comprehensive assortment of the most advanced immunological tests available.

September '07 - Yueh-hsiu Chien, PhD, professor of microbiology and immunology, has been named the Burt and Marion Avery Professor in Immunology.  Chien is an internationally recognized leader in T lymphocyte biology. She is a foremost authority on a type of T cells known as the gamma delta T cell, which is one of the least understood components of the immune system.  Her work has systematically unraveled key attributes of gamma delta T cells, which has significantly broadened the knowledge of how adaptive immune receptors function.

August '07 - Mark Davis, PhD, professor of microbiology and immunology, has been named the Burt and Marion Avery Family Professor.   Davis, who is director of the Stanford Institute for Immunity, Transplantation and Infection, is known for his work on how T lymphocytes recognize foreign entities. He is a past chair of the Department of Microbiology & Immunology.  The professorship was established with assets from the Burt and Marion Avery Professorship in Immunology. The Avery chair was established in 1988 with a gift from the late Burt Avery and his wife, Marion. The Averys have ties to Stanford spanning three generations.

July '07 - The American College of Rheumatology (ACR) has just announced its 2008 award winner, including these Stanford recipients:  Dr. Garrison Fathman, Professor in Medicine, Immunology and Rheumatology, has been named as an ACR Master.


July '07 - Dr. Ann M. Arvin, Lucile Salter Packard Professor of Pediatrics, Vice Provost and Dean of Research and Professor of Microbiology & Immunology, has been elected to serve a four-year term on the NIAID Council.      

July '07 - Postdoctoral fellows Cara Pager, PhD, and Yu Wong, MD, PhD, were awarded three-year Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation fellowships.  Pager's sponsor is Peter Sarnow, PhD, professor of microbiology and immunology, and she will be studying the role of newly discovered small RNAs in the regulation of the hepatitis C virus.  Wong's sponsor is Mark Davis, PhD, professor of microbiology and immunology, and he will be developing a novel method to monitor the immune system in breast cancer patients with the goal of designing a targeted immuno-therapy.  The awards provide financial support to outstanding young scientists who are conducting theoretical and experimental research relevant to the study of cancer and the search for its causes, mechanisms, therapies and prevention.

July '07 - HHMI funds youth science programs
The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has awarded the School of Medicine $750,000 over five years to increase youth interest in science.  The grant will create the school's first coordinated precollege science education program by tying together three existing outreach programs: the Stanford Medical Youth Science Program, the Center for Clinical Immunology's Summer Research Internship Program and the genetics department's "Stanford at the Tech" Program [...]
Twenty -four first -year participants will spend five weeks shadowing physicians, attending career development lectures and interning at hospitals through the youth science program directed by professor of medicine Marilyn Winkleby, PhD.  Returning students will conduct eight weeks of hypothesis-driven research with immunology graduate students under associate professor of medicine PJ Utz, MD, director of the immunology center's internship program [...].

June '07 - Baby poop give Stanford researchers inside scoop on development of gut microbes
Stanford, Calif. - Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine are as interested in a baby's poop as doting parents are, and for good reason. [...] The Stanford team, led by David Relman, has made the most extensive survey yet of how the microbes establish flourishing communities in what began as a sterile environment.  Their findings will be published in the July issue of Public Library of Science-Biology. (for the full article go to this URL)

June '07 - Stanford researchers clarify protein's role in multiple sclerosis
Stanford, Calif. - A protein found primarily in the lens of the eye could be the critical "tipping point" in the spiral of inflammation and damage that occurs in multiple sclerosis, researchers at the Stanford Schooll of Medicine report. (for the full article go to this URL)

June '07 - The Stanford University School of Medicine Award for Outstanding Service to Graduate Students was given to Karla Kirkegaard, PhD, professor and chair of microbiology and immunology.  This award, voted on by all graduating MS and PhD students and by the medical faculty, recognizes remarkable and extraordinary service on behalf of medical school graduate students.

May '07 - John C. Boothroyd, PhD, professor of microbiology and immunology, has been elected to fellowship in the American Academy of Microbiology. Boothroyd's research focuses on protozoan parasites and their interaction with human hosts. His laboratory's work has led to the development of several new methods for the diagnosis and treatment of parasitic disease. For the past several years, Boothroyd has focused on Toxoplasma gondii, a serious pathogen in the newborn and a major opportunistic infection of AIDS patients.

April '07 - ITI is happy to announce that Professor PJ Utz, MD, Associate Professor, Immunology & Rheumatology, has been nominated as the ITI Associate Director of Education. Dr. Utz has pioneered the CCIS/ITI Summer Student Intern Program. The Program was founded in 1998 for Bay Area High School Students interested in Biology.  This year the program will run from June 18 until August 10.  On August 9, 2007 there will be a poster session showing the excellent work of the interns.

April '07 - Dr. Harry Greenberg, Senior Associate Dean for Research and   Grant Professor of Medicine has just been voted the President-elect  of the American Society of Virology ? a great honor bestowed by a community of distinguished scientists. http://med.stanford.edu/profiles/Harry_Greenberg/

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