Institute for Immunity, Transplantation and Infection

Harnessing the body's natural defenses

If the body were a country, the immune system would be its national guard. And it couldn't ask for a better homeland defense. The immune system is remarkably effective at protecting us against the millions of pathogens that threaten us daily. We have only to see what happens when our immune system is compromised – from disease, for instance, or by immunosuppressant drugs following organ transplantation – to understand the power it wields when it's operating at full strength.

Our goal is to understand and ultimately control how the immune system defends the body at the molecular and cellular levels. ITI teams, comprised of immunologists, pathologists, microbiologists, infectious disease experts, surgeons, scientists, and clinicians, are attacking these challenges from dozens of different avenues and pooling their talents towards achieving this shared goal.  

Stanford Human Systems Immunology Center

Center for Human Systems Immunology receives $18.6 million for global immunology challenges, January 15, 2025

The Stanford Center for Human Systems Immunology has received a total of $18.6 million in grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to tackle some of the world’s biggest infectious disease challenges.

A five-year $15.8 million grant is a renewal of previous funding, starting in 2014, which allowed the center to develop new approaches to diagnosis and vaccination for infectious diseases including tuberculosis, the No. 1 infectious disease killer in the world. The initiative also supported over 50 pilot projects and 45 projects with the Global Health Discovery Collaboratory — a network of foundation-funded organizations driving technical innovations in global health.

Read the full article here. 

Clockwise from top left: Catherine Blish, Christopher Barnes, Mark Davis, Prasanna Jagannathan, Purvesh Khatri, Nima Aghaeepour

Human Immune Monitoring Center

HIMC provides standardized, state-of-the-art immune monitoring assays at the RNA, protein, and cellular level, as well as archiving, reporting, and data mining support for clinical and translational studies. In partnership with the research community, we also work to test and develop new technologies for immune monitoring.

ITI Research

Read some of ITI Faculty's recently published research articles:

Science Translational Medicine, September 2025
"Afucosylation of anti-dengue IgG is associated with enhanced susceptibility to dengue virus infection postvaccination"

Immunity, August 2025
"A conserved immune dysregulation signature is associated with infection severity, risk factors prior to infection, and treatment response"

PNAS, March 2025
"Antibody reactivity against EBNA1 and GlialCAM differentiates multiple sclerosis patients from healthy controls"

Immunohorizons, February 2025
"Characterization of immune phenotypes in peripheral blood of adult renal transplant recipients using mass cytometry (CyTOF)"

Nature Immunology, January 2025
"The Creation Game: of AI and human creativity"

ITI in the Spotlight