The Centre for Critical Path Immunology will be managed by ITI but located at Beckman Coulter's Cellular Analysis Business Group in Miami, Florida.
The centre will act as a bridge between academic and commercial groups, with the hope of accelerating the process of translating scientific discoveries, often developed by academic institutions, to practical methods that could aid drug development.
It will investigate both diseases in which the immune system is over active and attacking the body, such as arthritis and multiple sclerosis, and diseases where an insufficient immune response contributes to the illness, such as HIV, TB, cancer and malaria.
"What's really clear is that the immune system plays a role in a whole range of diseases," says Louis Matis, the president of the ITI. "There's tremendous clinical opportunity."
Current techniques to deal with an over expressed immune response is to suppress the immune system - a method that can have many unwanted side effects, One of the ultimate aims of the work would be to develop a way of reprogram, rather than suppress, the over active immune system to normal behaviour, so that it can still fight infectious diseases.
One of the key focuses of this research will be to find biomarkers that signal the nature of a disease. These biomarkers, which could be the presence of a certain gene or protein, can indicate the likelihood of developing a disease, or the how the patient will respond to a treatment.
In addition to helping to diagnose which treatments will be suitable for a patient, the detection of biomarkers can accelerate drug development by suggesting which patients would respond well to a treatment. In this way, drug developers can create smaller trials without wasting time by testing drugs on patients who will not respond well to the treatment.
However, finding the biomarkers is no mean feat. Often a successful biomarker may be a combination of many different components, and finding the right combination from all the collected data will be no easy task, as Stephen Hurst, chief business officer of ITI explains: "It's a bit like looking for a needle in a field of haystacks, and not knowing exactly what the needle looks like."
The research centre will be using the very latest technology to help the researchers achieve their results as quickly as possible. The platforms will include: multi-parameter flow cytometry to characterise the cells in blood and other bodily fluids; cell specific Elispot assays and bulk immunoassays to assess the function of the different immune cells; gene expression microarrays and advanced bioinformatics tools.
"The efficiency of the research will be enhanced by having one organisation where all the different aspects of the work are conducted under one roof," says Matis.
In the past, inconsistent laboratory practices had often created conflicting results from academic institutions, but the new centre plans to maintain very high standards to produce rigorous and valuable results.
