Stanford Medicine
Institute for Immunity Transplantation and Infection–

HIMC - Human Immune Monitoring Center

The HEDCO Human Immune Monitoring Core

Support for the HIMC

The Institute of Immunity, Transplantation and Infection (ITI) proudly acknowledges the support of : The HEDCO Foundation, The Russell Foundation, The Sidney E. Frank Foundation, Becton, Dickinson and Co, and  the Office of the Dean. The creation of the HIMC was made possible by their generous contributions.

To help further support this bold endeavor, please contact June Lang, Senior Director of Development, Stanford University Medical Center: and tel: (650) 234-0674

click below to go to:

Protocols-Phase 1

The Human Immune Monitoring Center (HIMC) is a new facility, lead by David Hirschberg, Director, jointly developed by the Institute of Immunology, Transplantation and Infectious Disease (ITI) and the Center of Clinical Immunology at Stanford (CCIS). The laboratory is operational and is charged with developing and implementing assays that will monitor the health of the human immune system and to make these assays available to the Stanford Medical Research Community and others, as resources permit.

The goal of the HIMC is to provide scientific and innovative approaches to clinical physicians who are providers of basic patient care and engaged in clinical trials.  We will provide additional testing using advanced assays designed to measure immune function. This center will serve as a proving ground where clinicians, basic researchers and technologists can come together to innovate and translate basic research into clinical practice. We plan to do this through collaborations with medical researchers at Stanford and leading biotechnology and pharmaceutical company researchers. We will communicate our progress through scientific presentations, publications and training.  Our goal is to create a center where assays developed to make progress in one disease area will rapidly be adopted to work in other areas.

CCSR
The Center for Clinical Sciences Research

Virtually everyone recognizes that the immune system is important to our health.  And yet currently there are almost no recognized clinical assays to measure immune function. The goal of our center is to provide “one-stop-shopping” for a wide range of immunological tests on patient samples in which any type of immune disorder or response assay is needed. Currently there are a number of tests that are routinely done in research labs to measure immune function or markers of an immune response to disease. Mixed lymphocyte reactions provide information on antigen presentations and cytokine production.  Antibody arrays can give information on the specificity of response to antigens and if the response is specific and inflammatory or is regulatory and protective.  In addition, advances in phospho-flow cytometry techniques can give information on what pathways are being activated in response to some immune challenge.  All these tests can be done with just a few milliliters of blood and the results, when combined with antibody or nucleic acid measurements can be extremely useful in helping to monitor diseases or the response to vaccination or an infectious disease. Our assays will measure biomarkers that could give information about early disease detection, progression or response to treatment.  In a similar way these assays could find immune markers to better match donors and recipients in transplantation and to monitor both recipients and donor tissues for infectious diseases.

From the perspective of immune monitoring, the same assays could also be used to detect and stratify diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer’s and heart disease where recent results suggest an immune component.  Many of the new blockbuster drugs that are already on the market are either monoclonal antibodies or cytokines: immune molecules that dramatically alter patient immune function.  There currently is a great need to develop assays that monitor immune response to clinical treatment or even predict individual patient response to treatment. 

We have a number of specific Objectives that will foster an environment within the HIMC improve active collaboration of Stanford Clinical and Scientific Researchers.

  1. Adapt and provide a number of cutting edge biomarker assays that can be done on small amounts of patient blood.  This includes differential and functional assays on nucleic acids, proteins and viable cells that are collected with standardized protocols. These immune monitoring assays will become increasingly necessary to obtain funding and approval for clinical research trials.
  2. Leverage the HIMC’s highly trained staff to assist in experimental design, collection, preparation, archiving, assay and analysis of samples.
  3. Communicate with clinicians as to what assays are currently available in the research lab and adapt them to human use. Make it easier for clinicians to be involved in asking research related questions and generating the type of immune assays that could make clinical research experiments more valuable.
  4. Innovate with equipment, reagent, and software companies to develop new products that will improve our assays.
  5. Educate through continued training, seminars, publications, community outreach and other programs demonstrating immune assay utility.
  6. Create equipment interfaces that are designed to work together, speed throughput and minimize assay error.
  7. Create awareness of our activities through interactions with collaborators, the medical community and the general public.
  8. Integrate areas of medicine through information provided by the immune system.

Nuts and Bolts

The HIMC will provide a series of Immune assays on blood samples collected as part of clinical research at Stanford.

Samples will be collected and processed for plasma and cell proteins, nucleic acids and viable cells for numerous assays that will measure immune system response or function.

The technologies are continually improving but current bead based and array technologies combined with flow cytometry and mass spectrometry will be used.

For more information contact:
David L Hirschberg, PhD
Director, Center for Immune Monitoring
email:
phone: +1.650.723.1671
Stanford School of Medicine
CCSR Building 0125A
269 Campus Drive
Stanford, CA 94305-5166
fax: +1.650.498.6345

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