Personalized medicine, which seeks to match the right drugs to the right patients at the right time, has been most successful in cases where there is a clear genetic linkage between a disease and a therapy. This is not the case for many diseases, including most immune-mediated diseases, which involve more complex genetics and require new approaches for development of personalized therapies.
Our goal is to develop and use cutting edge systems biology approaches to elucidate molecular signatures of complex immune diseases, including autoimmunity and cancer. We expect these signatures to elucidate fundamental mechanisms of disease and response to therapy; new pharmacodynamic, patient stratification, and treatment response biomarkers; and new therapeutic approaches.
Examples of new therapeutic approaches include combination therapies for type 1 diabetes (T1D) predicted from resistance mechanisms and molecular signatures generated by RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) of treated patient whole blood samples.
Peter Linsley, PhD
Lab Members
Brenda Norris
Erin Witkop, PhD
Research Projects
Elucidating immune processes in tumors that affect patient survival and response to therapy
Exhausted CD8+ T cell populations linked to beneficial response in T1D
Shared germline-like TCR alpha chains in autoreactive CD4+ T cells in T1D
Featured Publications
Teplizumab induces persistent changes in the antigen-specific repertoire in individuals at-risk for type 1 diabetes.
J Clin Invest
Germline-like TCR-α chains shared between autoreactive T cells in blood and pancreas.
Nat Commun
Interconnected lineage trajectories link conventional and natural killer (NK)-like exhausted CD8(+) T cells beneficial in type 1 diabetes.
Commun Biol
Abatacept increases T cell exhaustion in early RA individuals who carry HLA risk alleles.
Front Immunol
Integrating Omics into Functional Biomarkers of Type 1 Diabetes.
Cold Spring Harb Perspect Med
Why a New Cancer Treatment Can Lead to Autoimmunity
Immunology to Change Lives: Where We're Going in 2023
BRI was formed with a clear plan: First, answer key fundamental questions about the immune system. Then, build on those answers to change lives. This is a very exciting time because we’re reaching that second stage of the plan.
Clues into Crohn's: Exploring Why the Immune System Attacks Beneficial Bacteria
Your gut is home to a huge community of bacteria called the microbiome. Some bacteria are good, some are bad — and some might hold the key to understanding an inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) like Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.
News
New Study in Nature Communications From Benaroya Research Institute Finds Islet Antigen Reactive TCR Alpha Chains are Shared Between Blood and Pancreas T Cells
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Publication of the Week: Deep Immune Phenotyping Reveals Similarities between Aging, Down Syndrome, and Autoimmunity
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