Division of Allergy, Immunology, and Transplantation (DAIT)

Cooperative Study Group for Autoimmune Disease Prevention

Formation and History

The Cooperative Study Group for Autoimmune Disease Prevention (CSGADP) was established in 2001 as a collaborative network of investigators with a focus on prevention of autoimmune disease, defined as halting the development of autoimmune disease prior to clinical onset by means other than global immunosuppression, and an emphasis on Type 1 diabetes. The initial network of five cooperative agreements was funded by NIAID, the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office for Research in Women’s Health, and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation International. Following the first five-year funding period, the Study Group was renewed through RFA AI05-026 with the award of six five-year cooperative agreements.

Mission

The mission of CSGADP is to engage in scientific discovery that significantly advances knowledge for the prevention and regulation of autoimmune disease. The specific goals enunciated in pursuit of this mission are:

• To create improved models of disease pathogenesis and therapy to better understand immune mechanisms that will provide opportunities for prevention strategies
• To use these models as validation platforms with which to test new tools applicable to human studies
• To encourage core expertise and collaborative projects designed for rapid translation from animal to human studies, emphasizing the development of surrogate markers for disease progression and/or regulation which can be utilized in the context of clinical trials

Composition

The current Study Group includes the following cooperative agreements and principal investigators (links are to non-federal websites):

• Drs. David Hafler and C. Garrison Fathman, “Regulatory T cells in autoimmune disease,” Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Stanford University
• Dr. Dale Greiner, “Adaptive immunity in virus-induced diabetes in BBDR rats,” University of Massachusetts Medical Center
• Drs. George Eisenbarth, V. Michael Holers, and Gerald Nepom, “Benaroya Research Institute/UCDHSC autoimmune cooperative study group,” Benaroya Research Institute and University of Colorado at Denver Health Sciences Center
• Drs. Linda Sherman and Linda Wicker, “Effects of insulin-dependent diabetes resistance alleles on CD8 tolerance in NOD,” Scripps Research Institute and Cambridge University
• Dr. Matthias von Herrath, “Achieving therapeutic antigen-specific tolerance in type 1 diabetes,” La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology
• Dr. C. Garrison Fathman,“Immunoregulation of autoimmunity,” Stanford University

Drs. Eisenbarth, Fathman, Hafler, Nepom, Greiner, Sherman, and von Herrath sit on the Group’s Steering Committee, with Dr. von Herrath serving as Chair. NIH representatives to the Steering Committee include Beena Akolkar (NIDDK) and Thomas Esch (NIAID).

Innovative Projects

The Steering Committee of the CSGADP has access to a discretionary fund to support additional projects that the Committee finds to be in keeping with the group’s mission. Projects eligible for discretionary fund support may include:

• Pilot/feasibility studies designed to gather preliminary results in support of new grant applications focused on autoimmune disease prevention
• Development and validation of novel reagents or animal models valuable for autoimmune disease research
• Discovery-based studies designed to enable and/or stimulate hypothesis-driven research in autoimmune disease prevention
• Hypothesis-driven studies of limited scope designed to complement or augment existing projects
• Modification or expansion of existing core resources, or establishment of new cores, to serve the research projects of the Study Group and/or the autoimmune disease prevention research community

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