SAN DIEGO GAINS POINTS AS BIOMEDICAL-RESEARCH HUB
By Bruce Lieberman
Union-Tribune Staff Writer
May 3, 2004 - La Jolla will be home to the nation's largest database exploring how the human body's immune system fights disease-causing agents - those occurring naturally and others possibly used as terrorist weapons.
The La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology has received $25 million from the National Institutes of Health to head the 7-year project, scientists at the immunology group said.
By gathering in one place research into SARS, West Nile virus, smallpox, anthrax and other infectious agents, scientists hope to accelerate the development of new and better vaccines.
A prototype of the database should be available to scientists around the country within a year.
"If many people can discover vaccine targets . . . but they can't share and do discovery work together, that would be a big loss," said Stephen Wilson, an immunologist at the institute and an investigator on the database project.
"This is an information-technology solution to a research problem."
Also involved in the project are the San Diego Supercomputer Center, The Scripps Research Institute and Science Applications International Corp - all in La Jolla - and the University of Copenhagen.
The San Diego Supercomputer Center, at UCSD, is already home to the nation's databank of proteins, the molecular building blocks that make up the body's cells and tissues.
Having both a protein database and a clearinghouse of immunology research in La Jolla will further make San Diego a hub of biomedical research, Wilson said.
"Many groups studying one disease or another will gather all their data and submit it to the database," said Alessandro Sette, the institute's lead scientist on the project.
The Immune Epitope Database will be used by researchers to measure immune reactions, develop new diagnostic methods, design and evaluate new vaccines, understand how certain microbes can escape the body's immune system and gain insights into what constitutes a successful immune response, Sette said.
Epitopes are small sites on pathogens - or disease-causing agents - that the body's immune system focuses on when it begins an immune response. Many epitopes are small, integral parts of larger proteins that make up an infectious agent, such as the SARS or smallpox viruses.
The human immune system can recognize millions of epitopes, and discriminate between those found in healthy cells and those that signal an infection.
As researchers attempt to develop new vaccines, they need to know which epitopes will illicit the most powerful immune response.
Sette believes another huge challenge in immunology will getting a better understanding of why different human populations respond differently to the same pathogens, or the same vaccine.
"There is a massive effort going on, looking at hundreds of different genes that have variations in different human populations, and correlating those differences to (immune) responses," he said.
Although that genetic analysis is not the subject of the new database, the information will probably be linked to the epitope database to help researchers testing new vaccines.
In all likelihood, immunologist Wilson said, new vaccine discoveries will be made by those working at the intersection between proteomics, the study of proteins, and those who study epitopes.
"It's possible that a protein chemist will solve immunology problems because they'll finally be able to give us resolution of a protein that also has an immunologic function," Wilson said.
"When those things come together, proteomics will actually hit the road. . . . Someone's protein discovery will transform into a vaccine."