A five-year, $24 million National Institutes of Health grant to study innate immunity could supply a bounty of new reagents and animal models as well as a free database of experimental information to immunologists. Innate immunity, the once unappreciated first-line defense against infections, has recently been implicated in sepsis and inflammatory disorders such as Crohn disease. As more scientists got hooked on the new revelations, long-time collaborators Alan Aderem at the Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) in Seattle, Wash., and Richard Ulevitch at The Scripps Research Institute and others decided to unite technologies from their institutions. "We're going to set up cell-based systems to look at gene-expression profiles following stimulation and extend that eventually to proteomics," Ulevitch says.
The two teams modeled the project loosely on the Alliance for Cellular Signaling (see The Alpha Project). Scripps, based in La Jolla, Calif., is developing and screening mutant mice to uncover novel ...
