Unraveling the Mysteries of the Human Immune System
Raphael Valdivia, PhD, is the Nanaline H. Duke Distinguished Professor of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology and the chair of the Department of Integrative Immunobiology. He began his career by focusing on microbes that cause disease, and now he studies microbes that promote health. “Microbes educate our immune system,” he said. “I needed to understand the immune system if I wanted to understand the microbe.”
There will be a growing drive to understand human immunology, moving away from traditional model systems and tackling humans’ uniqueness. We’ve figured out the mouse immune system, but humans remain a mystery. Many drugs and cellular therapies that work well in mice will not work in humans, and we don’t know why.
There will be a race to better understand the human immune system and to leverage it to address acute and chronic diseases: cancers, neurodegenerative diseases, organ rejection, and autoimmune diseases. We’ll be taking immune cells out of the body, engineering them, and putting them back to precisely guide immunity.
We’ll also be harnessing AI to understand how immune cells work as an organized system with multiple components that behave differently in time and space and are guided by our genetics, diet, metabolism, and microbiomes. Accurately predicting the behavior of the immune system will lower the risk of unintended consequences.
The immune system of aging is another frontier. We understand much about immunity in younger people but less about the exhausted immune system.
We are also facing the re-emerging threat of infectious diseases. There is much we don’t know about how the human immune system limits the damage caused by pathogens, and about long-term sequalae that come from chronic infections such as long COVID and Lyme disease.
Finally, there’s an increased appreciation of the role that inflammation and a dysregulated immune system play on virtually all diseases, from cardiovascular disease to obesity to neurological disorders. Most biomedical researchers, whether they like it or not, will need to become immunologists.
Duke is the birthplace of transplant immunology and has a strong history in infectious diseases and vaccine research. We’re building on our strengths by integrating basic discovery science with clinical and translational sciences and hoping to spark entrepreneurial activities to accelerate therapies from bench to bedside.
What Comes Next:
- Neuroscience: Using New Technologies to Understand the Brain
- Medical Education: Training Students to be Change Agents
- Vaccines: Fine-tuning Immune Response
- Geriatric Medicine: Caring for the Aging Brain
- Health Equity: Addressing Disparities in Pallative Care
- Cancer Research and Care: Personalized and More Effective Therapies
- Epidemiology and Population Health: Reaching Beyond Our Walls
- Genomics and Precision Health: Using Genetic Tools to Prevent Disease
Story originally published in DukeMed Alumni News, Fall 2024.
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