Working Groups
The Institute is composed of Working Groups that build on Stanford’s unique success in creating new knowledge at the interface between disciplines. This unique research environment is creating unprecedented opportunities to motivate and sustain interdisciplinary investigations of the highest quality. Each Working Group tackles problems in immunity, transplantation and infection.
Composed of faculty in the basic and clinical sciences the Working Groups have the following goals:
- Define the status of the field with respect to both basic science and clinical perspectives
- Outline the gaps in understanding that limit progress
- Invest new resources where they are likely to produce the greatest near term benefit in terms of new tools, concepts or treatments
- Manage the research effort by bringing in needed skills and by building the industry contacts eventually needed to exploit research discoveries
- Support collaboration with industry to develop discoveries
- Plan and supervise the trials needed to prove clinical benefit of new treatments
The ITI Working Groups are:
- Chronic Unexplained Illnesses: role of infection, immunity and
cardiovascular aging (Jose Montoya)
This working group meets on Tuesdays from 1:00 to 2:00PM in the CCSR building,
Room 2125. Stanford faculty members (and their research groups) currently
involved in this working group include Drs. Francois Haddad (Cardiology),
Cornelia Weyand (Immunology), Joseph Wu (Cardiology) and Jose G. Montoya
(Infectious Diseases). Research presentations by Stanford or outside speakers take place
during each meeting facilitating the discussion of preliminary data and
grounds for new collaborations and grant submissions. Light food and
drinks are served.
- Autoimmunity (Garry Fathman, Bill Robinson)
The new immunity group (under the umbrella of ITI) began an interactive lab meeting type series in November 2009 and meets on a quarterly basis. The format will be in a multiple lab meeting style where new, not yet published data and experiments will be presented by lab PIs within a fifteen minute format with up to an additional 15 minutes of discussion to allow others an insight into what techniques, experimental plans and models are available within the group. These meetings will be held on a quarterly basis and will change topics to include interesting new data from labs who work in similar areas. The meetings will be set up to discuss topics of general interest to all, one at a time during the quarterly <2 hour meetings. Topics will be chosen by the group and will include (but not be limited to) topics like immunoregulation, or Tregs, or tolerance, immune monitoring, or immunotherapy etc. The idea is to have one faculty member assigned as moderator and then solicit short presentations from up to four labs per session representing labs with an interest in the topic. Topics would be chosen based on mutual interest. The meetings will be held in one of the CCSR 4th floor conference rooms (or elsewhere depending upon interest, number of people attending) around lunch time 12:00 to 2:00 (lunch will be served). This format will be a good way to present hot new data and techniques and foster new collaborations. The general topic will be Regulatory T Cells. Next meeting: June 16, 2010, 12-2pm, CCSR, room 4105, topic: "Mechanisms Regulating Immune Tolerance," presented by Mark Davis, Bill Robinson and Garry Fathman.
- Stanford Alliance for Food Allergy Research or SAFAR (Kari Nadeau)
This working group meets on Tuesdays from 1:00 to 2:00PM in the CCSR building,
Room 2135. Stanford faculty members (and their research groups) currently
involved in this working group include Drs. Stephen Galli (Pathology), Mindy Tsai (Pathology), Scott Boyd (Pathology), Andrew Fire (Pathology and Genetics), Kari Nadeau (Pediatrics and Otolarnygology), and others are welcome to attend. Research presentations by Stanford or outside speakers take place
during each meeting facilitating the discussion of preliminary data and
grounds for new collaborations and grant submissions.
- Transplantation Tolerance (Sam Strober),
The goal of the group is to perform clinical protocols and laboratory research that will provide insights into the cellular and molecular mechanisms of immune tolerance to organ and bone marrow transplants. Studies will be carried out in both human protocol trials and in laboratory animals. Clinical trials are designed to completely withdraw immunosuppressive drugs from kidney, liver, and bone marrow transplant patients by the induction of immune tolerance. The working group is developing monitoring procedures for the HIMC that predict the tolerant state so that drugs can be withdrawn safely without causing rejection episodes or graft versus host disease. The group plans to apply for a multi-disciplinary NIH program project grant to fund the studies, and meets about once per one or two months to discuss progress. - Hepatitis C (Jeffrey Glenn),
The Center for Hepatitis and Liver Tissue Engineering is pleased to
host a monthly Research Symposium. The purpose is to provide a
forum for a monthly gathering of Center members to share on-going or
planned research activities related to hepatitis or liver tissue
engineering. At the least, this will be an opportunity to learn more
about the broad array of research being conducted at Stanford and
the VA that is relevant to the Center's themes. Hopefully, exciting
and productive collaborations will also be facilitated by this
venue. Students and postdocs are particularly encouraged to attend
as well. The meeting takes place the first Wednesday of every month
from 4:30 to 5:30 pm in Alway Bldg, Room M104. - Inflammatory Pain (Martin Angst),
The focus of this working group is to use an inter-disciplinary, proteomic
and metabolomic, systems biology and bioinformatics approach tailored
towards the discovery of pain biomarkers. A majority of pain conditions are
associated with tissue trauma and inflammation, which provides the rationale
for this working group to be part of ITI. Current members of the working
group have established a functional core network and infrastructure but
welcome additional investigators who share our interests. The discovery of
pain biomarkers will allow for the more accurate and effective diagnosis and
treatment of pain in disease-specific fashion. The group has conducted pilot
studies and has generated preliminary data that are the basis of current
proposals for peer-reviewed funding (e.g. NIH). - Rheumatoid Arthritis (Bill Robinson)
The working group on RA will provide a quarterly gathering to foster interactions and discussion of ongoing and planned research in RA and other autoimmune arthridities. Everyone is welcome to participate, and students and postdoctoral fellows are encouraged to attend. A quarterly meeting will take place on the first Wednesday of each quarter (January, April, July, October) at 3:00PM in Beckman B230. The topic of this meeting will vary from month to month, and will be announced by email preceding each meeting. Topics will include research presentations from Stanford investigators, seminars from external investigators, and discussions of collaborative research and grant funding opportunities.
The Working Group on RA will coordinate:
a) Arthritis Sample Biobank. The members of the RA Working Group will generate a tissue bank of samples from patients with RA, psoriatic arthritis, inflammatory-bowel disease associated arthritis, osteoarthritis, and other arthritis and control patients to facilitate the research of affiliated investigators.
b) Subsidized Pilot Studies in Arthritis in the HIMC. The RA Working Group will provide access to "credits" for proof-of-concept studies through ITI's Human Immune Monitoring Core. - Role of Chronic Infection in Human Disease (Michael Hsieh)
If ever there was a need for investigators from different disciplines to talk it is in dealing with the extraordinarily complex interactions between the human host and the non-human organisms growing within. This working group gives researchers the opportunity to come together and discuss their current research and to form collaborations to test new hypotheses that no one or two groups alone could tackle. Issues of concern are many but at a minimum include: 1) how our interaction with infectious agents produces diseases that are an indirect consequence of the infection (e.g., autoimmune disease, cancer, cardiovascular disease, etc.); 2) how to prevent the immune system from responding inappropriately to infection acquired naturally or through vaccines; and 3) how our interaction with infectious agents changes with age.
- CyTOF user group, Mark Davis, Holden Maecker
The group will meet every third Thursday of the month from 3 to 5pm in Beckman, Room B200 . The purpose of the group is to let people present their data and approaches and have time to discuss and ask questions.
Each month one of the labs on the attached list will present; each lab director will decide who will present the data.
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ITI Internal