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Allen Institute gives $125 million to new immunology institute; UC San Diego a partner

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The Allen Institute has donated $125 million to a new division dedicated to understanding the human immune system. Partners include UC San Diego and four other academic centers, the institute said Wednesday.

Paul Allen, the late Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist, made the donation to create the Allen Institute for Immunology. Allen died in October of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The new division is housed at the Allen Institute’s headquarters in Seattle.

Unlike many biomedical research projects aimed at specific diseases, this is a much more encompassing effort to devise models of how the immune system works in health and disease. It follows the ambitious pattern set by two other efforts, the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and the Allen Institute for Cell Science,

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“At the Allen Institute, we pride ourselves on our large-scale industrial approach to science,” said Allen Jones, its president and CEO, at a press conference announcing the immunology initiative.

Thomas Bumol, the former head of Eli Lilly’s Biotechnology Center in San Diego, has moved to Seattle to become executive director of the new institute. Bumol was Lilly’s senior vice president of biotechnology and immunology research.

Besides the University of California San Diego, the other four initiative members are: Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle; Benaroya Research Institute at Virginia Mason, also in Seattle; University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus; and University of Pennsylvania.

The new institute’s main goal is to extend immunology from basic research to get clinical insights in actual people. All of the five member institutions have access to patients and patient tissue samples, in addition to performing their own immunological research.

The human immune system uses multiple interrelated networks of cells and chemicals to detect and repel infections. At the same time, it contains elaborate checks and balances to prevent these networks from attacking the body. Failures can make people vulnerable to infections or cancer, or cause autoimmune diseases.

The Allen Institute for Immunology aims to build a sort of immune system atlas, with detailed descriptions of the cell types and networks. It will study how these components change over a period of one to three years, in both healthy volunteers and patients with different immune diseases.

To put discoveries to use as rapidly as possible, the institute said its data and tools will be made publicly available online.

Get the balance right

“Researchers have been studying the immune system for decades, but what we don’t yet understand is its dynamic balance,” Bumol said Wednesday at the press conference. “What does a healthy immune system look like? How does it shift when our body encounters different environments? How does it change when we age and what goes wrong?”

The institute will first study two cancers and three autoimmune diseases. They are multiple myeloma and melanoma; along with rheumatoid arthritis, ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease.

Unlike cancer, when the immune system fails to destroy abnormal cells, autoimmune diseases are the result of a hyperactive or wrongly directed immune system, which attacks normal cells.

UCSD and the University of Colorado are taking on the rheumatoid arthritis program. It’s headed by Dr. Gary Firestein, UCSD Health’s associate vice chancellor for clinical and translational research. As a medical doctor, Firestein treats those with rheumatoid arthritis as well as conducting research.

The program will study healthy people at elevated risk for rheumatoid arthritis, and continue to follow them if they develop the disease, Firestein said. This feature of the program, focusing on the transition between health and illness, got Bumol’s support.

Those individuals who have a family history of rheumatoid arthritis, or who test positive for certain antibodies, are at greater risk for the disease, Firestein said.

“About 1 percent of the general community will develop rheumatoid arthritis, but with our criteria, we can predict that about 40 to 50 percent of those individuals will ultimately develop the disease,” he said.

From understanding to treatments

“Ultimately we are hoping that if we understand that process, we could develop new therapies that would help prevent that transition,” Firestein said. “In other words, prevent people from getting rheumatoid arthritis, rather than waiting to get it and treat them with drugs for the rest of their lives.”

One part of the monitoring involves examining peripheral blood cells, specifically their pattern of gene activation, he said.

“We now have the technology to look at what genes are expressed cell by cell, as opposed to the old technology where you’d have to look at billions of cells all at the same time,” Firestein said.

Those who develop rheumatoid arthritis will also get synovial biopsies. A fine needle will be inserted into the inflamed joint, and part of the joint lining removed.

“We will be able to compare what the immune system looks like in the joint where it’s actually causing the damage to what’s going on in the blood,” Firestein said. “And that way we’re going to hopefully be able to discover how to use the peripheral blood as a window to what’s going on.”

The rheumatoid arthritis effort is still being organized. A web site with information will be established soon, Firestein said.

Such large-scale projects would not be possible without the donation and the Allen Institute’s support, Firestein said.

“It could not be done by writing NIH (National Institutes of Health) grants, it is far too ambitious for most other institutes or foundations,” he said.

Patients and others looking for more information on the Allen Institute for Immunology can find it at j.mp/aimmunology.

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