Jeffrey Bluestone, Ph.D., Director
Dr. Bluestone provided an update on the activities of the Immune Tolerance Network (ITN), headquartered at the University of California, San Francisco, and comprised of over 70 laboratory scientists, clinicians, and other technical experts. Additionally, ITN has more than 80 investigators around the world conducting studies, performing assays, and leading core facilities. ITN’s research areas include autoimmune diseases, islet transplantation, allergy and asthma, and kidney and liver transplantation.
Committed to a mechanistic assay focus, ITN seeks to investigate mechanisms of tolerance in the human clinical setting, accelerate the clinical development of tolerance agents through unique clinical studies, identify biomarkers of immune tolerance, and create new standards for clinical application of bioassays for immune tolerance and bioinformatics.
Along with ITN’s various cores, such as microarray and affimetrix gene chip, Dr. Bluestone highlighted several clinical trials. These include trials in islet transplants, diabetes, and just about to commence, vasculitis using an anti-CD20 antibody.
In summary, Dr. Bluestone noted that ITN has established a multi-disciplinary research network, and has implemented an inclusive process for peer review and prioritization of research proposals. More than 30 clinical and tolerance trials are ongoing or in development while three clinical and tolerance assays have been completed. All of the state-of-the-art core facilities are operational.