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:
- 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The working group is developing monitoring procedures for the HIMC that predict the tolerant state so that drugs can be withdrawn safely without causing rejection episodes or graft versus host disease.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 announce 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 The meeting takes place the first Thursday of the month from 3:00 to-4:00pm in CCSR 3125. The general format is two speakers, each for 30 min.
- Inflammation after Surgery (Martin Angst),
The focus of this working group is to use an inter-disciplinary systems biology approach to study and understand a complex disease such as pain in inflammation. Current members of the working group aim at establishing a functional core network and infrastructure. The working group will actively encourage additional investigators to join this vital research effort and contribute with other models, skills, and technologies. Our long-term goal is to discover biomarkers that provide a more quantitative and mechanistic basis for the diagnosis and evaluation of pain, leading ultimately to new, more targeted and effective treatments. The group plans to conduct pilot studies to generate preliminary data as the basis for applying for NIH funding. Meetings are held every 1-2 months on the last Friday of the month.
- Rheumatoid Arthritis (Bill Robinson)
The working gropu on RA will provide a quarterly gathering to foster interactions adn 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 quaterly 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)
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. The group meets once a month on Wednesdays, date/time announced by email, click here to subscribe.
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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. The first meeting will take place on July 24 at 3pm in CCSR, Room 4105 with Dr. Jerry Reaven who will speak about: "The insulin resistance and the metabolic syndromes: different names, different concepts, and different goals."
- Human Immune Monitoring Database (Amar Das)
Many more are in the works and suggestions from the community are welcome. Some support for these groups will be available this year as will be "seed" grant funding for the most promising projects.
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