Federal Grant Award Summary

The University of Pittsburgh received a $641,889 Project Grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) under the Allergy and Infectious Diseases Research program (CFDA 93.855) for the project "Developing a Molecular Taxonomy for Immune-Mediated Diseases," effective April 1, 2026 through March 31, 2031. The award funds research to develop precision biomarkers and machine learning tools that enable classification of inflammatory diseases by their underlying molecular mechanisms rather than clinical phenotype alone. The research team, combining expertise in immunogenetics, translational immunology, systems immunology, machine learning, and statistical genetics, will create novel computational approaches, including SIDER (Significant Interaction Directional Effect Representation) and MAGEN (Multiscale Network Approach for Genetic Architecture), to construct an omnigenic model linking disease-driving mechanisms across phenotypically distinct conditions such as arthritis, vasculitis, and scleroderma.

The project addresses a significant unmet clinical need: over 40 million patients with inflammatory diseases lack precision medicine strategies to guide targeted cytokine therapy, with 40–50 percent of rheumatoid arthritis patients failing first biologic therapy and 10 percent developing refractory disease. By adapting machine learning methodologies previously successful in tumor genotyping for cancer therapy, the research will generate evidence-based tools to stratify patients by causative molecular mechanisms, enabling more effective therapeutic targeting and improved health outcomes across multiple immune-mediated disease populations.