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An article in Seattle Magazine about the landscape for immunotherapy in Seattle gives a nice mention of the Benaroya Research Institute and the Immune Tolerance Network:

“Immunotherapy is being applied to a multitude of diseases, such as leukemia, melanoma, lupus and Graves’ disease. At the Benaroya Research Institute (BRI) at Virginia Mason, scientists are using immunotherapy to target type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis. Dr. Gerald Nepom started the immunology program at BRI in 1985, and this year, the National Institutes of Health asked him to lead the Immune Tolerance Network, a global effort across 250 research sites to develop ways to “reprogram” the immune system, preventing the immune responses that lead to diseases such as asthma and diabetes while still maintaining the body’s ability to fight infection. For the next seven years, the network will be headquartered at BRI, which will receive $27 million annually in support funding. ‘[Immunotherapy] is becoming big science,’ says Homer Lane, executive director at BRI. ‘It needs a lot of people to work together.’”

Washington, DC - Three-year outcomes from an ongoing clinical trial suggest that high-dose immunosuppressive therapy followed by transplantation of a person's own blood-forming stem cells may induce sustained remission in some people with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis (RRMS). RRMS is the most common form of MS, a progressive autoimmune disease in which the immune system attacks the brain and spinal cord. The trial is funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, and conducted by the NIAID-funded Immune Tolerance Network (ITN).

Last Friday the Immune Tolerance Network (ITN) opened a new combination therapy study in lupus nephritis, CALIBRATE, at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). The CALIBRATE Study will be led by Drs. Betty Diamond (North Shore Feinstein Institute), David Wofsy (UCSF), Cynthia Aranow (North Shore Feinstein Institute), and Maria Dall’Era (UCSF), and will test a novel regimen of rituximab (Rituxan, Genentech, Inc.) followed by belimumab (BENLYSTA®, GlaxoSmithKline) in patients with refractory lupus nephritis.

The results of the ACCESS study, “Abatacept and Cyclophosphamide Combination Therapy for Lupus Nephritis” sponsored by the Immune Tolerance Network (ITN) and led by Drs. Betty Diamond (The Feinstein Institute) and David Wofsy (University of California, San Francisco), were published this week in Arthritis and Rheumatology.  Abatacept (ORENCIA®) in combination with low-dose cyclophosphamide (Cytoxan, Bristol-Myers Squibb) did not improve the proportion of lupus nephritis patients who achieved a complete response compared to low-dose cyclophosphamide alone.

The Immune Tolerance Network (ITN) will receive the National Academies' Board on Research Data and Information Challenge Award for TrialShare on October 23rd, 2014. Adam Asare will accept the award on behalf of the ITN during the Symposium on the Interagency Strategic Plan for Big Data: Focus on R&D at the National Academy of Sciences Keck Building, Room 100. More information can be found here.

On Wednesday, October 8^th the ITN opened the CATNIP study, “Anti-TSLP plus antigen-specific immunotherapy for induction of tolerance in individuals with cat allergy,” at the first site, the University of Wisconsin.  CATNIP will test whether a novel therapeutic approach, cat immunotherapy combined with an investigational new drug called MEDI9929/AMG 157 (an anti-TSLP antibody being co-developed by Amgen and Medimmune) can lead to lasting tolerance to cat allergen.

A White Paper published yesterday in Transplantation (co-authored by ITN Deputy Director Larry Turka, MD) outlines recommendations from an international workshop convened by The Transplantation Society (TTS) to determine the necessary steps to make tolerance protocols a standard of care for transplant over the next decade.  To date three academic centers have employed successful tolerance-inducing protocols in kidney transplant recipients (Stanford University, Northwestern University, and Massachusetts General Hospital – the MGH studies were funded by the ITN), with the results of the ACCEPTOR kidney transplant study at Johns Hopkins yet to be determined. The combined efforts of these centers have resulted in 45 subjects off immunosuppression for variable lengths of time.

The Immune Tolerance Network’s (ITN) TrialShare Clinical Trials Research Portal (www.ITNTrialShare.org) has won the National Academy of Sciences Data and Information Challenge. The theme of this year’s competition, launched and judged by the academy’s Board on Research Data and Information (BDRI), was “Using Data for the Public Good.”

The Immune Tolerance Network (ITN) is currently seeking proposals for clinical tolerance trials in transplantation using solid organs or islets from deceased donors.

The ITN is hosting a Member Society Symposium entitled “Mechanisms of Tolerance” on June 25th, 2014 (12:45-pm-4:45pm CT) during the annual Federation of Clinical Immunology Societies (FOCIS) meeting in Chicago,  IL. The symposium features talks on emerging hypotheses of immune tolerance mechanisms.