A new nationwide research initiative, launched by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), hopes to improve vaccines and therapeutics. The NIH will allocate $100 million over five years to conduct the research at six Human Immune Phenotyping Centers—Baylor Research Institute, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Emory University, Mayo Clinic, Stanford University and Yale University. The first year of funding will come from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The research aims to understand changes in immune system activity before and after exposure to naturally acquired infections or to vaccines or vaccine components in such different sample groups as children, the elderly and people with autoimmune diseases. This knowledge will be used to develop safer, more effective therapeutics and vaccines. Each center will collect, characterize and store human samples. The resulting data sets will eventually be submitted to a centralized Web-based database.

Source: NIH