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
Bill Gates Visits the Center for Human Systems Immunology at the School of Medicine October 19, 2023
Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and co-founder of Microsoft, met with investigators at the Center for Human Systems Immunology. Led by Mark Davis, the center's director, and joined by Dean Lloyd Minor, the discussions focused on recent advances in human immunology and their potential impact on addressing global health challenges.
Stanford University has received a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to accelerate efforts in vaccine development. The $50 million grant over 10 years will build on existing technology developed at Stanford, housed in the Human Immune Monitoring Core, and establish the Stanford Human Systems Immunology Center. The center aims to better understand how the immune system can be harnessed to develop vaccines for the world’s most deadly infectious diseases.
Participants (from left to right): Karen Makar, Taia Wang, Mark Davis, Lloyd Minor, Bill Gates, Catherine Blish, Purvesh Khatri, Gerlinde Obermoser, Peter Kim. Back row: Erin McCaffrey, Chris Karp, Trevor Mundel, Jo DeSimone, Brian Hie, Bali Pulendran, Pras Jagannathan.
Photography: Jim Gensheimer
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 in the Spotlight
- – News Center
Bali Pulendran is new director of Institute for Immunity, Transplantation and Infection
– News CenterBali Pulendran is new director of Institute for Immunity, Transplantation and Infection
The institute’s purpose is to understand the human immune system at multiple levels — molecular, genetic and cellular — and to harness this understanding to prevent and treat disease.
– PR NewswireCuriox Biosystems Announces the Establishment of the Curiox Innovation Center for the Curiox C-FREE™ Pluto LT System at Stanford University's Human Immune Monitoring Center
/PRNewswire/ -- Curiox Biosystems, a global leader in providing innovative and automated sample preparation solutions for accurate and reproducible cell...
– News CenterAntibodies in blood soon after COVID-19 onset may predict severity
A look at antibodies in patients soon after they were infected with the virus that causes COVID-19 showed key differences between those whose cases remained mild and those who later developed severe symptoms.
ITI Research
Read some of ITI Faculty's recently published research articles:
Science Translational Medicine, July 2024
"A comparative immunological assessment of multiple clinical-stage adjuvants for the R21 malaria vaccine in nonhuman primates"
Nature Immunology, July 2024
"Specific CD4+ T cell phenotypes associate with bacterial control in people who ‘resist’ infection with Mycobacterium tuberculosis"
Nature Immunology, May 2024
"Germline-targeting immunogens guide bnAb development"