Research Activities
NIAID supports a wide range of programs to turn the promise of immune tolerance therapies into reality. Many of these are carried out by NIAID’s Division of Allergy, Immunology, and Transplantation (DAIT), which supports basic research into the mechanisms responsible for immune tolerance, translational research to facilitate the application of immune-tolerance approaches to human diseases, and clinical research to evaluate new therapies that can induce and maintain immune tolerance. New approaches are being investigated to:
- Improve understanding of the molecular mechanisms responsible for the induction and maintenance of immune tolerance
- Replace or improve suboptimal treatment protocols for immune-mediated diseases
- Discover methods to prevent or reverse immune-mediated disorders for which no effective therapies are currently available
- Create an efficient research infrastructure for the development and rapid testing of tolerogenic agents in human immune-mediated diseases
- Clarify mechanisms by which tolerogenic agents suppress disease
In collaboration with the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, DAIT supports the Nonhuman Primate Transplant Tolerance Cooperative Study Group (NHPCSG). The goal of this program is to evaluate the safety and efficacy of novel tolerogenic regimens in preclinical models of kidney and islet transplantation. Scientists in this study group have demonstrated long-term graft acceptance using tolerogenic regimens in both kidney and islet allograft recipients. In FY 02, this program was expanded from 3 to 10 research grants. This expansion has allowed a larger number of tolerance-induction strategies to be rigorously evaluated, allowed the sharing of valuable resources, and facilitated the development of new collaborations. In FY 05, the NHPCSG will be further expanded to include heart and lung transplantation. To accelerate research conducted through this program, DAIT maintains breeding colonies of specific pathogen-free rhesus and cynomolgus macaques.
Other DAIT-supported research programs that include studies on immune tolerance are the Autoimmunity Centers of Excellence; Innovative Grants on Immune Tolerance; and program projects in basic biology, basic immunology, and transplantation tolerance.
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