Autoimmune Life Blog

It was the dead of the night in Brisbane, Australia. Maree Doolan, then a nurse, was in the middle of a long shift. “We were messing around and decided to take our blood sugars,” she says. “I was shocked that mine was quite high, in the 280 range.

It’s the 1990s in Seattle. Grunge music is getting national play. Amazon operates out of a garage. And a mysterious protein catches the eye of Steve Ziegler, PhD.

At this point, we’ve lived through many phases of the pandemic: closing schools and sanitizing surfaces. Mask mandates and mRNA vaccines. Now, we’ve reached a new phase, with still more questions: How dangerous is the Delta variant?

The discovery of insulin 100 years ago transformed type 1 diabetes (T1D) from a death sentence to a chronic illness. Yet T1D is still a relentless disease with no cure.

Throughout the pandemic, Cate Speake, PhD, and the Center for Interventional Immunology have conducted countless COVID-19 studies — from understanding how the immune system responds to the virus to testing the Pfizer vaccine.

The Boeing Classic is back! After the event was canceled in 2020 due to the pandemic, we can’t wait to host the annual golf tournament and fundraiser from August 16-22, 2021.

After six miles and several hours of hiking in the heat of the day, Andrea Williams reached her destination: A view of Mount Rainier so close and clear that she couldn’t even fit the whole mountain in a photo. Then she checked her blood sugar.

Picture this: A kid joins an asthma study and donates a blood sample through a new research network called Childhood Asthma in Urban Settings (CAUSE). That sample could travel as far as 3,000 miles to get to BRI. 

Words like “immunocompromised” are broad by design: They’re meant to encompass how a wide variety of conditions impact the immune system.

What if doctors could treat type 1 diabetes (T1D) by teaching the immune system to stop attacking cells in the pancreas? BRI researchers are working with the pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk and global research consortium T1D TrialNet, testing a new approach that aims to do just that.