Fourth Round of Pilot Grant Awardees Announced

The CCHI IOFM Core funded nine applications submitted in response to our RFA released August 31, 2022. The CCHI Steering Committee sought applications from CCHI centers to capitalize on emerging opportunities and encourage multi-center, multi-disciplinary collaborations. The immediate objective of the CCHI is to support mechanistic and hypothesis-testing studies to understand human immunity applicable to the biodefense effort (i.e. innate, adaptive and mucosal immune responses to infection, vaccination and adjuvants). Studies on immune-mediated diseases (e.g. airway allergy, food allergy, autoimmunity, organ transplant rejection) and basic human immunology are also of interest, as these data will provide a more comprehensive understanding of the human immune system.  Special consideration is provided to investigators from groups shown to be underrepresented in the represented in the biomedical workforce (NIH’s Interest in Diversity, NOT-OD-20-031), Early Stage Investigators/New Investigators (ESI/NI, please see NIH Next Generation Research Initiative Policies), and investigators who are relatively new to human immunology research.

See the list of awardees below:

William Hildebrand, PhD, MA from the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center
CCHI Center: Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation, Coggeshall/Thompson, PD/PI
Project Title: HLA Typing Core for CCHI Investigators

Camila Coelho, PhD, MSc, MBA from Mount Sinai
CCHI Center: La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology, Crotty, PD/PI
Project Title: Defining the antibody repertoire of monkeypox vaccination in humans

Stylianos Bournazos, PhD, MA from Rockefeller University
CCHI Center: Rockefeller University, Ravetch, PD/PI
Project Title: Immune Complex Mediated Expansion of High-Affinity Memory B-cells Through Fc-Receptor Gating

Nicholas Provine, PhD, from University of Oxford
CCHI Center: Massachusetts General Hospital/University of Pennsylvania, Chung and Wherry, PD/PIs
Project Title: Defining the mechanisms of immunogenicity of MVA as a vaccine against monkeypox

Anoma Nellore, MD from the University of Alabama at Birmingham
CCHI Center: University of Alabama at Birmingham, Lund PD/PI
Project Title: Using Ex Vivo Lung Perfusion to Model Flu-specific B cell Recall Dynamics in Human Lung

Nir Hacohen, PhD from Broad Institute/Harvard Medical School
CCHI Center: Massachusetts General Hospital/University of Pennsylvania, Chung and Wherry, PD/PIs
Project Title: A large-scale barcoded library of human peptide-HLA complexes for querying peptide-binding stability and TCR recognition

Tushar Desai, MD, MPH from Stanford University
CCHI Center: Stanford University, Davis, PD/PI
Project Title: Immunoregulation by Fc glycoforms in a scalable human mini-lung system
MPI: Taia Wang, MD, PhD; Elizabeth Mellins, MD, PhD

John LaCava, PhD from the Rockefeller University
CCHI Center: Rockefeller University, Ravetch, PD/PI
Project Title: L1 amplifies type-I interferons with consequences to multiple immune responses
MPI: Tomas Mustelin, MD, PhD from the University of Washington

Prasanna Jagannathan, MD from Stanford University
CCHI Center: Stanford University, Davis, PD/PI
Project Title: SARS-CoV-2 specific T cell responses in malaria-exposed individuals