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:
- Autoimmunity (Garry Fathman), <<NEW>>
The new immunity group (under the umbrella of ITI) will begin an interactive lab meeting type series in November 2009. 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 first meeting will be on Friday, November 18th, from 12 noon to 2:00pm (lunch will be served) in CCSR, 4th floor, room 4105. Please RSVP to Michele King at mking@stanford.edu. The general topic will be Regulatory T Cells. Garry Fathman will be the moderator for the first session and he, as well as Larry Steinman, Dave Lewis and Rob Negrin, will present their lab’s new research on Tregs.
- 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 Thursday of the month
from 4:30 to-5:30 pm in 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 (John Boothroyd/Gary Schoolnik)
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.
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Glomerular Disase and Renal Injury (Richard Lafayette)
The workgroup proposes to study IgA nephropathy as an initial focus to lead to better understanding of renal injury and progressive fibrosis. A major component of these studies will be to establish a Northern CA/Bay Area consortium of renal practices to allow access to a large number of patients with renal disease. We plan to utilize the tools available in the Human Immune Monitoring Core to demonstrate immunologic perturbations in glomerular disease through the evaluation of cytokine, RNA and other protein profiles in the blood and urine. These studies will also point to changes in other aspects of these patients' blood and urine which should help to identify processes that either limit or account for renal inflammation, repair or fibrosis in glomerular injury. Once we have an initial evaluation of a large cohort for a single disease such as IgA nephropathy, we can compare these findings in each and every glomerular disease to search for prognostic indicators and for targets of therapy. - Causes and Consequences of Obesity (Marc Melcher)
Obesity has reached epidemic proportions in the United States. Multidisciplinary, collaborative approaches towards understanding the molecular mechanisms and consequences of obesity will be necessary to develop preventive and therapeutic options. The goal of this working group is to bring basic scientists and clinicians together who are knowledgeable in immunology, infectious diseases, transplantation, and endocrinology to develop research plans and collaborations. Both local and external investigators are being invited to present their research inform participants of on going work and of potential recourses. Each meeting will end with a brain storming session on potential collaborative projects. Ideally, concrete action plans will be formulated to initiate one or more of these projects and obtain NIH funding. Dr. Jerry Reaven gave the first talk about: "The insulin resistance and the metabolic syndromes: different names, different concepts, and different goals."
- Vaccine Immunology and Development (Gary Schoolnik)
The purpose of the Vaccine Immunology and Development working group will be to develop a program within ITI to foster interdisciplinary research, teaching and other activities on vaccine immunology and development. We hope to bring together researchers in the infection, immunity and cancer research groups as well as other members of our faculty who are active in basic, translational, clinical and population based research. Initially we will focus on two approaches.
1) Using existing, approved and effective vaccines, increase our understanding of the basic biology and immunology of how vaccines work.
2) Using a pathogen or type of cancer where no effective vaccine exists, investigate novel methods for vaccine design. These could include approaches such as virus-free particles coated with lymphokines or other molecules, anti-idiotype therapies, novel adjuvant development, etc. - Immune Metrics: Defining Immunological Health (Mark Davis)
Members of this working group are collaborating to develop new technology and informatics tools to define immunological 'metrics' of human health. The group serves as focal point for creating and applying new technologies that can make immune monitoring faster, cheaper and more broadly available. Bioinformatics expertise is employed both to find key biomarkers of immune function and to develop immune-system specific tools. The group meets monthly from 2 to 3:30pm in Clark S361. The next meeting is on November 20, 2009, speakers to be announced. On December 18, the speakers are:
Juan Santiago 'Novel on-chip assays using isotachophoresis' and
PJ Utz: ' Protein arrays for human immune monitoring.'
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ITI Internal