Based at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) of The University of Chicago, the CIIC represents an important next step in the growth of the immunoengineering community at UChicago.
Founded as the Institute of Molecular Engineering in 2011, the PME is a joint initiative by The University of Chicago with Argonne National Laboratory to revolutionize the approach towards engineering research and education. Instead of traditional departments, interdisciplinary research themes are ‘disciplines’ that organize researchers into intellectual sub-communities within PME, bringing together expertise from multiple backgrounds towards solving society’s most pressing problems in information, energy and environment, materials, and health. In the latter, we recognized the rapidly growing importance of immunology in understanding and treating most chronic diseases, and the unique opportunity of building the new PME allowed the PME leaders to focus hiring efforts on interdisciplinary researchers working on the interface of bioengineering and immunology.
The recruitment of Profs. Jeffrey Hubbell & Melody Swartz in 2014 from their previous investigatorships at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland anchored the PME’s efforts to establish a strong foundation in this newly defined research thrust of Immunoengineering. Since then, the PME Immunoengineering program has rapidly grown to encompass 12 tenure-track faculty members (including joint appointments).
Together, the faculty lead labs that focus on answering challenging questions in immunology by developing and implementing new technologies, and also translating fundamental discoveries towards capabilities to manipulate, stimulate, and eventually control the immune system to address many conditions ranging from cancer and infections to allergies and auto-immune diseases. Specifically, our teams are innovating the next generation of diagnostics and therapies that will directly impact human health: vaccines against cancer, nanomaterials that restore immunological balance, interventions that reduce the severity of allergies and autoimmune disorders, new diagnostics that predict which treatments will be most effective, and therapeutics that kill diseased cells with less collateral damage. They have spun off four startup companies based off this work.
Our world-class team of researchers, clinicians, and engineers are supported by data science experts, access to a world-class medical center, core laboratory facilities, and established technology transfer pipelines to translate scientific discoveries into new treatments and ventures. Co-directors Profs. Hubbell & Swartz founded the CIIC as a realization of their vision to unite all of these key ingredients of immunoengineering innovation under one framework, effectively changing the calculus for research and development of the immune system in order to improve human health.