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Vaccine Program Receives Federal Grant to Study Immune System Response to Viruses
The Stanford-LPCH Vaccine Program will receive a $3.1 million program project grant to serve as a Vaccine Immunology Basic Research Center of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health.
The grant will be used to address the deficiencies in knowledge about how the developing immune system responds to viruses.
Ann Arvin, professor of pediatrics (infectious diseases) and of microbiology and immunology and co-director of the Stanford-LPCH Vaccine Program, is the principal investigator for the program. The grant includes three research projects focusing on "antiviral immune mechanisms in early childhood." The human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) - one of the leading infectious causes of congenital birth defects in the United States - will serve as a model for studying patterns of impaired or delayed immunity in early childhood.
The individual research projects and their project leaders are "Postnatal ontogeny of HCMV-specific CD4 T-cell immunity," David Lewis, associate professor of pediatrics (immunology and transplantation biology); "The evolution of CD8 T-cell responses to HCMV in infants," Arvin and Harry Greenberg, senior associate dean of research and co-director of the Stanford-LPCH Vaccine Program; and "Antigen presentation: Ontogeny and modulation by HCMV," Elizabeth Mellins, associate professor of pediatrics (immunology and transplantation biology) and Edward Mocarski, professor of microbiology.
Corry Dekker, pediatric infectious diseases, will direct the clinical core for the program.
The project will have direct relevance for designing an effective HCMV vaccine, said Arvin, as well as general significance for developing new viral vaccines and improving the safety and efficacy of existing vaccines for use in young children.
The Stanford-LPCH Vaccine Program is one of several new Multidisciplinary Research Programs (MDRPs) established at the School of Medicine. "The MDRPs were created in order to enhance interactive research programs in areas that bridge a variety of different research fields" said Greenberg. "The successful competition for new NIH program project funds is exactly the type of result we hoped to achieve through support of these programs" he said.
