Jackson Lab awarded grants to boost vaccines, enhance biomedical database
Courtesy / Marie Chao, Jackson Laboratory
Jacques Banchereau, professor and director of immunological sciences at Jackson Lab's Farmington, Conn., genomic medicine institute, will get a $4.3 million grant over five years to develop agents to boost the effectiveness of vaccines.
BAR HARBOR - The Jackson Laboratory will get a $3.4 million grant over five years to develop new agents that boost the effectiveness of vaccines to better protect elderly and immunosuppressed patients, while The Jackson Laboratory’s Gene Expression Database will get $10.5 million to be further developed.
The $3.4 million grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases will go to Jacques Banchereau, professor and director of immunological sciences at Jackson Lab’s Farmington, Conn., genomic medicine institute.
“Vaccines are essential public health tools that have protected countless individuals from illness and death due to infectious disease,” Banchereau said in a statement, “but many in use today provide insufficient protection, especially for older patients and those with compromised immune systems.”
An estimated 90% of U.S. deaths due to influenza are in people aged 65 and older, according to Jackson Lab.
The money will go towards developing the agents, known as adjuvants, which are components of vaccines that are added to boost the immune response to vaccines.
However, Banchereau said that to date, few adjuvants have been proven safe and effective for use in humans.
“This new funding will allow us to screen new combinations of adjuvants in human immune cells, and to investigate their mechanisms of action, with the ultimate goal of discovering new combinations that boost the efficacy of vaccines and lead to new vaccine development,” he said.
Adjuvant substances include components of bacterial cell walls and some forms of DNA. They generally stimulate an immune response by mimicking a natural infection, and augment the activities of specific components of the immune system.
The research team will initially focus their efforts on human dendritic cells, searching for combination adjuvants that lead to enhanced immune response in vitro (in lab dishes) and in laboratory mice. Jackson Lab said they will work with industry partners to bring successful combinations to human vaccination trials.
Expanding international database
The $10.5 million grant to the Gene Expression Database, which is open to the international research community, comes from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development.
“We capture and integrate mouse expression data generated by researchers worldwide, with particular emphasis on mouse development, and make these data freely and widely available, readily accessible to powerful database searches,” Jackson Laboratory Associate Professor Martin Ringwald, the principal investigator of the database, said in a statement. “Gene expression data provides researchers with critical insights in the function of genes and the molecular mechanisms of development, differentiation and disease. This is vital information for scientists who are investigating normal human development, birth defects and other developmental disorders, cancer and many other diseases.”
The database is part of the lab’s overall Mouse Genome Informatics program. Jackson Lab said the new funding will support the continued development of the database, including further data curation and integration, an expanded database infrastructure and enhanced data displays and query tools.
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