Mayo Clinic wins NIH grant to track behavior of human immune systems

Mayo Clinic is one of six medical research centers in the United States tapped by the National Institutes of Health to study the long-term reactions of human immune systems to diseases and vaccines.

NIH hopes the five-year, $100 million effort, funded by the federal stimulus law, will help researchers design better vaccines to treat diseases like influenza, pneumococcus and the West Nile virus.

“Recognizing the differences in immune system activity before, during and after exposure to an infectious agent or vaccine will help in the development of safer, more effective therapeutics and vaccines,” Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), said in a statement. “This research effort also will contribute to the ongoing evolution in our ability to study the immune system.”

The project will track how the immune systems of children, the elderly and people suffering from autoimmune diseases like lupus behave before, during and after exposure to natural pathogens and vaccine treatments.

Until now, researchers have mostly relied on animal models to study immune responses. Large-scale clinical testing of human immune systems are virtually non-existent, according to the Human Immune Monitoring Center at Standford University, one of the centers to receive the NIH funds.

By loading data from the project into a large database and using algorithms to comb through the information, researchers hope to discover biomarkers that will indicate how human immune systems react broadly to vaccines, and bacteria and viruses.

“This research effort represents a major expansion of efforts to define the principles of human immune regulation instead of relying on findings from animal models that have limitations and cannot always be extrapolated to people, ” Dr. Daniel Rotrosen, director of the Division of Allergy, Immunology and Transplantation at NIAID, said in a statement.

“The knowledge gained also will improve our understanding of the range of vaccine responses in particular sub-populations, including newborns, young children, the elderly, patients taking immunosuppressive medications and those with underlying diseases of the immune system, such as allergy and autoimmune diseases,” he said.

Mayo’s project will be directed by Dr. Greg Poland. In addition to Mayo and Stanford, the other centers include Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Massachusetts, Baylor University in Dallas, Texas, and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.