The Colton Center for Autoimmunity at Yale has announced its 2024 class of awardees, selecting eleven faculty-led projects for grant funding to advance research into autoimmune and allergic diseases. The awards — spanning one development grant and ten pilot grants — come with more than financial support: each recipient also receives expert mentorship, access to industry expertise, and guidance on commercialization strategy.
This year’s cohort reflects the breadth and ambition of the center’s research agenda. Projects target a wide range of conditions including systemic lupus erythematosus and lupus nephritis, antiphospholipid syndrome, asthma and allergies, ANCA-associated vasculitis, age-related macular degeneration, and cystic fibrosis. Among the most distinctive projects is an AI-driven effort to simulate human immune responses in silico — a novel computational approach to modeling autoimmunity — alongside work on rationally designed allergy vaccines, bispecific antibodies, inhaled phage therapy, and small molecule strategies for inducing antigen-specific immune tolerance.
The center, established in 2019 through a gift from philanthropists Judith and Stewart Colton and managed by Yale Ventures, was designed specifically to bridge the gap between promising scientific discovery and commercial viability. Many impactful research breakthroughs stall without the proof-of-concept funding needed to attract industry partners — and these grants are designed to carry researchers across that threshold.
Yale’s Colton Center is part of the broader Colton Consortium, which also includes centers at Penn, NYU, and Tel Aviv University, collectively advancing autoimmunity research on a global scale
Featured Experts
Sara Baier, MEd
Associate Director of External Relations, Colton Consortium for Autoimmunity
Colton Center for Autoimmunity, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania
Jennifer Gillen, MBA
Administrative Manager, Judith & Stewart Colton Center for Autoimmunity (NYU)
Department of Medicine, NYU Grossman School of Medicine / NYU Langone Health, New York University
Kenneth Hassinger
Director of Finance, Colton Consortium for Autoimmunity
Colton Center for Autoimmunity, Perelman School of Medicine, University of PennsylvaniaFeatured Projects
Novel Tools to Track and Manipulate Immune Cells in Autoimmunity Models
Developing a cell-labeling tool to map immune cell interactions in living tissue, this project identifies the drivers of skin-resident T cell persistence in psoriasis and potential targets for disease prevention.
Early Detection and Diagnosis of Autoimmune Diseases Using Foundation AI Models
Applying self-supervised AI to multi-modal electronic health records — integrating clinical notes, labs, and imaging — this project builds scalable diagnostic models to detect autoimmune diseases earlier and more precisely.
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