Institute for Immunity, Transplantation and Infection

New technologies and analyses will facilitate our ability to identify immune biomarkers that will help evaluate vaccine efficacy and effectiveness. The elucidation of signatures of protection and immunogenicity will also serve to inform decisions by BMGF and their partners for prioritizing vaccine candidates and determining go/no-go advancementwhich merit in clinical trials. Novel immunobiological insights deriving from high dimensional analysis of infections (e.g., tuberculosis) and syndromes (e.g., environmental enteropathy) will also serve to expand vaccine concept and intervention concept diversity, respectively. 

Methods and technologies we will employ include:

• Granting access for Stanford Center for Human Systems Immunology partners to state-of-the-art human immune phenotyping.
• Interrogating samples from experimental medicine studies, vaccine trials and natural history studies (including those of syndromic conditions of concern, including premature birth and enteric enteropathy) using next generation sequencing technologies, CyTOF, combinatorial tetramer analysis and other innovative proteomics and cell labeling techniques.
• Studying the specific T cell, B cell and innate immune responses elicited by vaccination and by pathogens (and by inflammatory syndromes of unclear etiology).
• Developing expertise and reagents for the analysis of non-human primates.

The Center will function as an incubator for novel immune phenotyping technologies and analytical approaches for high-dimensional data visualization and modeling algorithms, as well as data mining and analysis. Stanford has an unparalleled history in developing innovative new methodologies for the analysis of immune responses, including among others: CyTOF/FACS, flow citometry, peptide-MHC tetramers for the analysis of T cell responses, next generation sequencing, and single cell analysis using mass cytometry.

As methods and techniques evolve to promote a deeper interrogation of human immune responses to pathogens with complex genomes, it is vital to meaningfully process the high-dimensional datasets that are created. 

We will develop an incubator for new visualization, analytic and data sharing resources for immune and related data. Ease of analyzing, accessing, and sharing data will enable collaboration and new breakthroughs at Stanford and around the world. 

The Center for Human Systems Immunology, in the Institute of Immunity, Transplantation and Infection, with funding from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is pleased to solicit applications for pilot projects. Deadline for submission is April 6, 2015. These projects should aim to advance the global health priorities of the foundation in the areas of HIV, TB, Malaria, neglected infectious diseases (e.g. Dengue) and pathogens that cause pneumonia or enteric diseases in the developing world. There are three general categories for this funding:

1. Innovative Technologies
2. Innovative analytical tools
3. Studies of established cohorts