CURED BERKELEY
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Autoimmune & Inflammatory Diseases
Something triggers the immune system to attack the body it was built to protect. Berkeley is determined to find out why, and how to stop it.
Autoimmune diseases affect more than 50 million Americans, disproportionately impact women and children, and are rising faster than almost any other disease category.
We don't fully understand why the immune system turns against the body, and until we do, existing treatments can only manage symptoms rather than correct the underlying malfunction. Berkeley is built to change that. We don't chase profitable medicines that address symptoms and have to be taken indefinitely. We tackle problems at their roots, pursuing the fundamental mechanisms of autoimmunity with the goal of delivering lasting solutions. By mapping the genetic drivers of immune dysfunction, applying AI and protein engineering to rewire inflammatory circuits, and developing ways to restore what the immune system loses, we are building the science that makes that possible. The goal isn't better management. It's cures.
Goals
Existing immunotherapies transformed cancer care, but did not treat all types of cancer successfully. The ones it fails have the fewest options and the least time. At Berkeley, we're going upstream, asking fundamental questions about why the immune system sometimes fails to recognize and destroy cancer. We're investigating the signals, mechanisms, and pathways that can trigger broad tumor rejection across cancer types, learning to overcome the immunosuppressive environment tumors use to hide, and restoring the immune cells that exhaust before finishing the job. This isn't a single drug program. It's the mechanistic foundation for the next wave of cancer immunotherapy.
What we're doing
Genes & Pathways
Autoimmune disease begins with specific genetic variants and early immune triggers that set the disease in motion. We are uncovering the key pathways and genes that control autoimmunity and inflammation, screening patient genomic data to identify disease-causing variants, and building disease models to test what we find.
Autoimmune-Arthritis, MS, Diabetes, vasculitis
Chronic Inflammatory Diseases
Neurodegenerative Diseases
Key Personnel
Greg Barton, Ph.D.
Professor
Dept. of Molecular & Cell Biology
Michel DuPage, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Dept. of Molecular & Cell Biology
Lin He, Ph.D.
Professor
Dept. of Molecular & Cell Biology
Dan Portnoy, Ph.D.
Professor
Dept. of Molecular & Cell Biology
Dept. of Plant & Microbial Biology
Ellen Robey, Ph.D.
Professor
Dept. of Molecular & Cell Biology
Robert Saxton, Ph.D.
Professor
Dept. of Molecular & Cell Biology
Sarah Stanley, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
School of Public Health​
Russell Vance, Ph.D.
Professor
Dept. of Molecular & Cell Biology
Allon Wagner, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Dept. of Molecular & Cell Biology
Precision Therapies
Understanding the genetic basis of autoimmunity is only the first step. We are developing algorithms to identify key regulatory nodes from human profiling data, applying AI and machine learning to engineer proteins and small molecules that rewire inflammatory circuits, and testing new therapeutic candidates in preclinical models.
AI/ML proteins to rewire inflammatory responses
Precision based inhibitors of molecular pathways of inflammation
Microbiome influences
Early in life, the immune system learns to recognize the body's own cells and leave them alone. In autoimmune disease, that learning fails. We are uncovering how that process works, and engineering ways to restore it, so the immune system stops attacking what it should protect.
Drivers of autoimmune diseases
Host - microbiome interactions
Rewire microbiome for Disease treatment
