Sculpting Innate Immunity
As the body’s first line of defence, the innate immune system has enormous therapeutic potential, sensing and initiating responses to infection, injury, metabolic stress, and chronic inflammation. Modulating innate immunity with precision and accuracy could unlock a new paradigm in human health.
What is an opportunity space?
Opportunity spaces are areas of research that we believe are ripe for breakthroughs. They are defined by our Programme Directors, and must be highly consequential for society, under-explored relative to their potential impact, and ripe for new talent, perspectives, or resources to change what’s possible.
Core beliefs
The core beliefs that underpin this opportunity space:
The immune system is responsible for either maintaining health or mediating pathology for nearly all known human disease → effectively harnessing the immune system is essential if we wish to transform human health.
The innate and adaptive immune systems are equal pillars of immunity but so far, we’ve largely only reaped the benefits of modulating the adaptive immune system → the innate immune system is the next frontier for unlocking the full benefits of immune modulation.
Optimal modulation of the innate immune system will require 'sculpting' with both precision and accuracy → new tools from synthetic biology, drug delivery, and in vitro immune models, combined with new insights from innate immunology, large-scale biological data, and AI, can create a new therapeutic paradigm across the spectrum of disease.
Read the programme thesis: Sustained Viral Resilience
- Traditional vaccines, which train the adaptive immune system, fall short of providing robust protection against rapidly mutating or novel pandemic viruses, leaving humanity vulnerable to significant viral threats.
- We can achieve broad, sustained resilience to these viruses by engineering the innate immune system—the body's first line of defence—which has naturally evolved to provide wide-ranging protection.
- We propose creating a new class of medicines, or "innate vaccines," that provide safe, long-lasting (>3 months) prophylactic protection against a wide spectrum of respiratory viruses from a single administration.
- This programme would integrate cutting-edge advances in AI, synthetic biology, and materials chemistry to engineer innate immunity with unprecedented precision, accuracy, and durability.
- By proving this is possible, the programme aims to catalyse a new era of innate immunotherapies, creating a launchpad to tackle not just viruses but a range of diseases.
Meet the programme team
Our Programme Directors are supported by a core team that provides a blend of operational coordination and highly specialised technical expertise.
Brian Wang
Programme Director
Brian co-founded the non-profit Panoplia Laboratories to pre-develop medicine for the next pandemic. Brian has a PhD in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, conducted postdoctorate research in synthetic biology at MIT, and was Head of R&D at vaccine development start-up Alvea.
Andrea Szydlo-Shein
Programme Specialist
Andrea holds a PhD in neuroscience and neurobiology, with postdoctoral work in immunology and industry experience in all three fields. She has expertise in small molecules and RNA therapeutics and has served in a range of roles, from lab research to scientific project management. Andrea supports ARIA as an operating partner from Pace.
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