The Stanford Center for Human Systems Immunology has received a total of $18.6 million in grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to tackle some of the world’s biggest infectious disease challenges.
A five-year $15.8 million grant is a renewal of previous funding, starting in 2014, which allowed the center to develop new approaches to diagnosis and vaccination for infectious diseases including tuberculosis, the No. 1 infectious disease killer in the world. The initiative also supported over 50 pilot projects and 45 projects with the Global Health Discovery Collaboratory — a network of foundation-funded organizations driving technical innovations in global health.
The foundation’s grant also supports two new projects:
Catherine Blish, MD, PhD, the George E. and Lucy Becker Professor in Medicine and a professor of infectious diseases, and Christopher Barnes, PhD, an assistant professor of biology, will identify ways to improve vaccines by increasing the breadth of the immune response.
“One of the major challenges in vaccinology is learning how to induce a broad response that can protect from the vast array of distinct virus strains,” Blish said. “We will study how such a broad response develops to both SARS-CoV-2 and HIV and use this information to improve vaccine design.”
Mark Davis, PhD, the Burt and Marion Avery Family Professor and a professor of microbiology and immunology, and Prasanna Jagannathan, MD, an associate professor of infectious diseases and of microbiology and immunology, will research determinants of protection from malaria, particularly in low- to medium-income countries.
“Malaria is one of the world’s most devastating diseases with over 263 million cases recorded in 2023 and almost 600,000 deaths, mostly young children,” Davis said. “It is a major challenge for my group to take this on, but with the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and its extensive expertise and network of clinicians and scientists, our unique approach and technology could make an impact, and I look forward to leading this overall effort together with Professor Blish.”
The foundation awarded the Center for Human Systems Immunology two additional grants:
Blish will receive $1 million over three years to launch other pilot projects across Stanford University, with the goal of driving cross-disciplinary collaboration toward solving the world’s largest public health issues.
Purvesh Khatri, PhD, a professor of biomedical informatics, will receive $1.8 million over three years to build foundational models for human immunology. He will harness recent advancements in machine learning and artificial intelligence to create a unified, open-source computational infrastructure that supports translational research in infection and vaccine studies. Nima Aghaeepour, PhD, an associate professor of anesthesiology, perioperative and pain medicine and of pediatrics, is a co-investigator on this award.
