Major NIH grant helps establish the Oklahoma Center of ImmunoEngineering

The University of Oklahoma has received an $11.5 million award from the National Institutes of Health to establish the Oklahoma Center of ImmunoEngineering, a new research center designed to accelerate the study and treatment of diseases rooted in the immune system.

The five-year Phase I award, funded through NIH's Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence program, will build a statewide immunoengineering research network and establish two specialized research cores at OU. The center is led by principal investigators Wei Chen, Ph.D., and Chongle Pan, Ph.D.

Immunoengineering applies engineering tools and principles to analyze and manipulate the immune system - dialing its activity up or down depending on the disease. For cancer or viral infection, the goal is to amplify the immune response. For autoimmune diseases, the goal is to suppress them. The field generates significant volumes of data, and making sense of that data is increasingly where new discoveries are made.

To support those discoveries, the center will house two research cores that operate in close coordination: the Immunomodulation Technology Core, which supports experimental laboratory work, and the Omics Data Science Core, which provides the computational tools and expertise to design experiments, manage large-scale data collection and interpret results.

Co-PI Chongle Pan will lead the data science side of the center. His work anchors the Omics Data Science Core, which will develop new computational tools and analytical methods to help researchers across Oklahoma harness the full potential of their immunoengineering data.

OCIE has selected four early-career faculty as research project leaders, each paired with two experienced mentors drawn from OU's Norman and Health Sciences campuses:

• Daniel Becker, Ph.D., assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences, will study immune response and coronavirus infection in migratory bats.
• David Miller, Ph.D., assistant professor in the School of Biomedical Engineering, will develop neuroimaging-guided immunotherapy approaches for glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer.
• Marmar Moussa, Ph.D., assistant professor in Computer Science and Biomedical Engineering, will investigate T-cell receptor-antigen interactions in peptide-based cancer vaccines.
• Abdul Rafeh Naqash, MD, associate professor in the College of Medicine and Director of Immuno Oncology at the Stephenson Cancer Center, will study alveolar soft part sarcoma, a rare cancer, focusing on molecular vulnerabilities in its tumor immune microenvironment.

Beyond the four research projects, OCIE will offer monthly seminars, research roundtables, training workshops and an annual symposium. The center will also fund pilot and team-science projects aimed at connecting basic, translational and clinical researchers.

Oklahoma is one of the states served by NIH's Institutional Development Award program, which works to build research capacity in states that have historically received lower levels of federal research funding.

Source:

University of Oklahoma