More than 15 faculty from seven different schools and departments join together to form the new Center for Immunoengineering at Georgia Tech.  This new effort brings biomedical engineers, bioengineers, chemical engineers, chemists, biologists and mechanical engineers together to encourage new innovative approaches to study the immune system and to assess, predict and control immune response.

Krish Roy, PhD, professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering and faculty member of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience (Petit Institute), will head the new center.

The mission of the Immunoengineering Research Center is to develop breakthrough engineering tools and methods for personalized and predictive health care of patients. The center will focus on three grand challenges: ability to rapidly provide a comprehensive immunological status of a patient, to quantitatively predict immune function in a patient and to precisely modulate and control the immune response of a patient.  

“The center will facilitate integration between Georgia Tech researchers and partner institutions including Emory University and its various immunology and vaccine centers,” Roy explained.   

In addition to Roy, the center will be led by a faculty executive committee which includes, M.G. Finn, professor, school of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Susan Thomas, assistant professor, George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and associate professors, Julia Babensee and Melissa Kemp and Cheng Zhu, professor from biomedical engineering.  

“Developing engineering technologies to modulate the immune system is critical to manage autoimmune disorders like multiple sclerosis and type I diabetes, as well as to address immunodeficiencies,” Ravi Bellamkonda, chair of the biomedical engineering department, stated. “It is increasingly apparent that the immune system also plays an important role in regeneration of injured tissues and therefore immunoengineering can have a broad and significant impact on human health.”

New mechanistic methods based on engineering principles are being developed which in recent years have lead to tremendous strides in the development of potential therapeutics and the identification of new vaccine design, better biomaterials, as well as new avenues for commercialization and clinical translation.

 “There is tremendous opportunity in bringing this group of researchers together under the immunoengineering umbrella,” Robert Guldberg, executive director of the Petit Institute, said. “This new center will bring together researchers from a wide-variety of backgrounds to tackle complex research problems in new and exciting ways.”