Autoimmune Life Blog

To understand what causes type 1 diabetes (T1D), imagine a spy novel. It starts with a hero, the T-cell, that roams your body like James Bond. The T-cell hunts down enemies — bacteria and viruses — and snuffs them out. Then something goes terribly wrong: The hero becomes a villain.

One goal is to find markers that identify why some people with the virus don’t have symptoms while others get fatally ill. The sickest patients tend to have multiple health issues, which makes it hard to pinpoint the factors related to COVID-19.

BRI scientists were sure of one thing when the novel coronavirus struck: They had the expertise to make swift progress toward understanding it and finding better treatments. “Studying how the immune system responds to viruses has been part of our work for years,” says BRI’s President Jane Buckner

COVID-19 has put a therapy called hydroxychloroquine in the spotlight — and, at the same time, shrouded it in confusion.

With a newly awarded $4 million grant from The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust, BRI and SCRI will now focus on using their novel approach to generate an engineered T cell product that can be used in a future first-in-human clinical trial.

Over the past year, BRI has been working toward a new vision of creating a healthy immune system for everyone.

We’re all hearing that people with underlying conditions and immune deficiencies are more susceptible to COVID-19. It’s natural for people with autoimmune disease to wonder what this means for them.

We recently kicked off a potentially game-changing partnership with the new Allen Institute for Immunology. Fueled by a $125 million gift from the late Paul G. Allen, this partnership aims to learn more about how the immune system works from health to disease.

In April 2017, Steve Gordon and his daughter, Callie Triller, hiked to Machu Picchu in Peru. Seven months later, Steve started experiencing severe joint pain and learned he had rheumatoid arthritis (RA).

Immunotherapy is one of the biggest medical breakthroughs in decades: It can cure some cancers by telling the immune system to find and kill cancer cells.