Beck Brachman, PhD, knew the immune system was somehow involved in depression. “If you transfer immune cells from stressed and ‘depressed’ mice to new mice, will that cause depressive symptoms? Will they be anxious?” she posed while recalling her earliest work in preventative psychopharmacology.
That was the question Brachman and her colleagues at the National Institute of Mental Health first asked in 2009. What they found was unexpected. Instead of observing a transfer of behavior, the immune cells of chronically stressed mice improved the depressive and anxious symptoms of the receiving mice.
The study presented a new path for anti-depressant drugs that provided protection from stress, an appealing avenue as many chronic diseases remain largely intractable, with treatments being symptom suppressing but not curative or preventative.
“We don’t have biologically based diagnostics for psychiatric disorders,” Brachman told GEN. “There’s a lot of emerging evidence that many diseases that we put in the bucket of psychiatric are either immunological diseases or have immunological triggers.”
Today, Brachman and colleagues announced a $15 million raise in philanthropic funding for Imprint Labs, a non-profit company that aims to decode the body’s immune memory to understand chronic diseases, such as long-COVID, psychiatric disorders, and dementia. The New York City-based start-up will identify new therapeutic targets by reconstructing immune histories, an approach the team terms as “forensic immunology.”
Beck Brachman, PhD, CEO at Imprint
Given that chronic disease research often relies on prospective longitudinal clinical studies that may span decades, Imprint aims to make chronic disease research more tractable by leveraging high-throughput immunomics, single-cell sequencing, and compute power to understand the large immune space at scale, without the need to recruit resource-intensive cohorts.
Brachman will take on the role of Imprint’s CEO. The company’s co-founders represent Columbia University, Cornell Tech, and Mount Sinai Hospital. While the current team sizes up to a little over a dozen, Brachman says Imprint is actively hiring.
Imprint is a Focused Research Organization (FRO) supported by Convergent Research, an incubator for philanthropic ventures and funded in part by Eric Schmidt, Wendy Schmidt, and Ken Griffin as part of the Schmidt Futures Network. Over the past four years, Convergent has secured funding from 30-plus individuals and institutions.
FROs are given a finite time, usually five years, to pursue “prespecified, quantifiable technical milestones,” rather than open-ended research. Additionally, FROs must actively disseminate and deploy the public goods they create into the real world, which can be achieved by open-sourcing data and tools, a contrast with many for-profit counterparts who keep proprietary resources under lock and key.
“The immune record is a robust system that we still can’t read, and our scientific tests often come up short when we inquire into the root causes and mechanisms of chronic illnesses,” said Adam Marblesone, PhD, co-founder and CEO at Convergent Research. “Researchers need better tools, and that’s why it’s so exciting that the brilliant team at Imprint is at work to bridge that critical gap in our immunological understanding.”
Immune fingerprint
In addition to being an army of defenses, the immune system is an archive that stores a memory, or imprint, of the threats that it encounters, such as allergies, infections, autoimmunity, cancer, and toxins, in immune cells.
According to Victor Greiff, PhD, co-founder and director of computational immunology at Imprint, each individual has a unique “immune fingerprint” characterized by a diverse adaptive immune repertoire of B and T cells that recognize, neutralize, and eliminate pathogens and abnormal cells.
Victor Greiff, PhD, co-founder and director of computational immunology at Imprint
Billions of B-cell receptors can exist in a single individual at one time. This diversity is generated by the processes of V(D)J recombination, where T cells and B cells randomly assemble different gene segments to form unique receptors, and somatic hypermutation, where B-cell receptors undergo point mutations to refine antibody affinity and specificity to optimize the immune response.
“There is very little overlap of immune receptors across individuals, so it’s hard to find patterns of disease because you’re constantly comparing apples to oranges,” Greiff told GEN.
Specifically, Imprint seeks to uncover the causal connection between infection and autoimmune disease, or so-called “trigger-target” relationships. This goal pairs functional binding information with immune cell sequencing information, an active gap in the immunology space, as most public immune receptor databases are not annotated with antigen binding. Unlocking these relationships could provide a new avenue for high throughput identification of disease targets.
“We have a lot of immune receptors that just differ by one or two amino acids. While they differ very little in the actual sequence, they can vary widely in what they bind,” Greiff highlighted.
Looking ahead, Imprint’s first steps after launch are to establish the company’s antigen annotation data generation pipeline. The team will also build and test its computational toolset in neuropsychiatric and autoimmune disease applications to establish proof-of-concept in trigger-target relationships.
According to Brachman, Imprint is developing tools for impact, where interesting results motivate researchers to invest in a field, such as psychiatric disorders, even if they do not immediately produce a target that is ready for therapeutic development. Aligned with this mission, the company plans to make its resulting technology open access for wide use.
The post Imprint Labs Launches to Pioneer “Forensic Immunology” For Chronic Disease appeared first on GEN - Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.
That was the question Brachman and her colleagues at the National Institute of Mental Health first asked in 2009. What they found was unexpected. Instead of observing a transfer of behavior, the immune cells of chronically stressed mice improved the depressive and anxious symptoms of the receiving mice.
The study presented a new path for anti-depressant drugs that provided protection from stress, an appealing avenue as many chronic diseases remain largely intractable, with treatments being symptom suppressing but not curative or preventative.
“We don’t have biologically based diagnostics for psychiatric disorders,” Brachman told GEN. “There’s a lot of emerging evidence that many diseases that we put in the bucket of psychiatric are either immunological diseases or have immunological triggers.”
Today, Brachman and colleagues announced a $15 million raise in philanthropic funding for Imprint Labs, a non-profit company that aims to decode the body’s immune memory to understand chronic diseases, such as long-COVID, psychiatric disorders, and dementia. The New York City-based start-up will identify new therapeutic targets by reconstructing immune histories, an approach the team terms as “forensic immunology.”
Beck Brachman, PhD, CEO at Imprint
Given that chronic disease research often relies on prospective longitudinal clinical studies that may span decades, Imprint aims to make chronic disease research more tractable by leveraging high-throughput immunomics, single-cell sequencing, and compute power to understand the large immune space at scale, without the need to recruit resource-intensive cohorts.
Brachman will take on the role of Imprint’s CEO. The company’s co-founders represent Columbia University, Cornell Tech, and Mount Sinai Hospital. While the current team sizes up to a little over a dozen, Brachman says Imprint is actively hiring.
Imprint is a Focused Research Organization (FRO) supported by Convergent Research, an incubator for philanthropic ventures and funded in part by Eric Schmidt, Wendy Schmidt, and Ken Griffin as part of the Schmidt Futures Network. Over the past four years, Convergent has secured funding from 30-plus individuals and institutions.
FROs are given a finite time, usually five years, to pursue “prespecified, quantifiable technical milestones,” rather than open-ended research. Additionally, FROs must actively disseminate and deploy the public goods they create into the real world, which can be achieved by open-sourcing data and tools, a contrast with many for-profit counterparts who keep proprietary resources under lock and key.
“The immune record is a robust system that we still can’t read, and our scientific tests often come up short when we inquire into the root causes and mechanisms of chronic illnesses,” said Adam Marblesone, PhD, co-founder and CEO at Convergent Research. “Researchers need better tools, and that’s why it’s so exciting that the brilliant team at Imprint is at work to bridge that critical gap in our immunological understanding.”
Immune fingerprint
In addition to being an army of defenses, the immune system is an archive that stores a memory, or imprint, of the threats that it encounters, such as allergies, infections, autoimmunity, cancer, and toxins, in immune cells.
According to Victor Greiff, PhD, co-founder and director of computational immunology at Imprint, each individual has a unique “immune fingerprint” characterized by a diverse adaptive immune repertoire of B and T cells that recognize, neutralize, and eliminate pathogens and abnormal cells.
Victor Greiff, PhD, co-founder and director of computational immunology at Imprint
Billions of B-cell receptors can exist in a single individual at one time. This diversity is generated by the processes of V(D)J recombination, where T cells and B cells randomly assemble different gene segments to form unique receptors, and somatic hypermutation, where B-cell receptors undergo point mutations to refine antibody affinity and specificity to optimize the immune response.
“There is very little overlap of immune receptors across individuals, so it’s hard to find patterns of disease because you’re constantly comparing apples to oranges,” Greiff told GEN.
Specifically, Imprint seeks to uncover the causal connection between infection and autoimmune disease, or so-called “trigger-target” relationships. This goal pairs functional binding information with immune cell sequencing information, an active gap in the immunology space, as most public immune receptor databases are not annotated with antigen binding. Unlocking these relationships could provide a new avenue for high throughput identification of disease targets.
“We have a lot of immune receptors that just differ by one or two amino acids. While they differ very little in the actual sequence, they can vary widely in what they bind,” Greiff highlighted.
Looking ahead, Imprint’s first steps after launch are to establish the company’s antigen annotation data generation pipeline. The team will also build and test its computational toolset in neuropsychiatric and autoimmune disease applications to establish proof-of-concept in trigger-target relationships.
According to Brachman, Imprint is developing tools for impact, where interesting results motivate researchers to invest in a field, such as psychiatric disorders, even if they do not immediately produce a target that is ready for therapeutic development. Aligned with this mission, the company plans to make its resulting technology open access for wide use.
The post Imprint Labs Launches to Pioneer “Forensic Immunology” For Chronic Disease appeared first on GEN - Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.