Paul Allen's Philanthropic Legacy Continues with Support for a Brand-New Field of Health Research

Since Paul Allen’s death five years ago, the philanthropic instruments carrying on his vision have done so in part through an array of science funding, enabling open research into human and animal biology, and backing research teams and organizations to generate foundational knowledge about the brain, cells, genetics and more. The latest chapter in Allen’s philanthropic legacy: a new research center to speed the development of an emerging avenue in the study of human biology and health — the interaction between the human nervous and immune systems and the paradigm-breaking notion that many serious diseases may in fact be “sensory maladies” of the human body.

The newly announced Allen Discovery Center for Neuroimmune Interactions at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai — funded initially with $10 million over four years, and potentially with $20 million over eight years — will assemble an interdisciplinary team to study the crosstalk between the peripheral nervous system and the immune system and understand the role of those interactions in human health and disease, possibly including inflammatory diseases, cancer, depression, metabolic disorders like diabetes and others. The center's goal is to uncover knowledge that may lead to new treatments and therapies.

The Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group, which is housed within the Allen Institute, has been operating its discovery center research model since 2016, with four other centers currently in operation. The Frontiers Group was created to look for emerging ideas in science, particularly those fueled by interdisciplinary ideas and advances.

In the run-up to the establishment of this latest center, the Frontiers Group put out a call for proposals. (Frontiers doesn't provide funding directly; it recommends funding proposals to the grantmaking Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.) To establish the new Discovery Center, the Allen Institute selected the Icahn School team headed by researchers Brian S. Kim of Mount Sinai and David Artis of Weill Cornell Medicine.

Like many areas of human biology and health at the cellular or molecular levels, the study of the neuroimmune system is a field that's been made possible by recent advances in research technology, including fields like optogenetics, chemogenetics and viral tracing, Kim told me. These technologies enable scientists to study and trace the activity of individual cells, capabilities only developed in recent years.

The proposal’s multidisciplinary nature and its use of the latest biomedical research technologies made it a natural choice for the Allen and Frontiers Group team. "[The proposal was] something that caught our eye, both for the fundamental biology that's going to be uncovered but also for the new technology that's been created and will need to be created in order for some of these insights to occur," said Kathy Richmond, executive vice president and director of the Frontiers Group and the Office of Science and Innovation at the Allen Institute. "Research in the last decade has shown that there are some key interactions that we weren't aware of and that are going to be pivotal both in human health and fundamental biology."

“Sensory maladies” of the human body

The notion that the nervous system, particularly the sensory functions of the nervous system, might interact with the immune system to create disease may seem counterintuitive to nonscientists, physicians and even researchers. "Medicine has traditionally thought of the nervous system as mostly the brain, and the immune system as something to fight off infections, cancer or other diseases, but hasn't connected that those things are related," Kim said.

But new research is showing that the body senses information within itself, such as information about microbes like bacteria and fungi, in thousands of ways, Kim said. This goes far beyond the basic five senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell that provide information about the world external to our bodies, and it’s not a stretch to imagine that the nervous system collects a lot more information about the world inside the body. This expanding view of sensory information and processing is giving rise to the notion that some diseases — such as allergies, inflammatory conditions and possibly even cancer — could actually be sensory maladies of the human body, Kim said, traceable at least in part to the ways that the nervous and immune systems interface.

The new Discovery Center will bring together researchers with backgrounds in neurobiology and immunology, as well as researchers from fields like cancer, to understand how interactions between these key systems relay sensations and information back to the brain and regulate functions like organ physiology and immune responses in tissues. This new perspective on the relationship between the body's internal sensory systems and the astoundingly complex immune system could revolutionize our understanding of human biology and disease, and lead to a new paradigm to develop treatments.

As an essentially brand-new field, neuroimmunology needs the kind of backing that is only likely to come from a philanthropic funder willing to work on the leading edges of research, Kim said. "The Allen Foundation understands that you need to make bets in new areas of science," he said. “This work would never have been funded by the NIH, but we hope to get to the point within five years or so when it will be funded by the NIH and government.”

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