The words “Immune Health” are ones you might expect to see on the cover of a health and fitness magazine in the grocery store checkout line, probably paired with an active verb like “boost” and followed by some tips that involve supplements or superfoods.
At Penn Medicine, they mean something different and far more powerful.
Immune Health® is a term trademarked by Penn as a new area of scientific discovery and medical care that our scientists and physicians are actively bringing into existence, along with a growing list of partners across academia and industry. Scientists at Penn Medicine are deeply profiling individual immune systems to understand how they function as a unique fingerprint, a piece of your health-and-disease puzzle that’s unique to you, but also a key to new ways of thinking about health care.
Like the Genomics Revolution for the Immune System
The vision they are working toward is comparable to the way genetics has suffused medicine in recent years. Most people know that their individual genetic sequence is as unique as a fingerprint. For the last two decades, medical science has used our growing understanding of patterns within those fingerprints to develop more personalized treatments. People who share certain gene variants or combinations of them share genetic diseases, or risks for developing certain conditions, or a tendency to react differently to some medications compared to other people. When you develop cancer, your doctor may have the tumor’s genome sequenced to see how its DNA mutated to make it grow, and to show where its weaknesses lie—because plenty of cancer treatments are designed to target specific mutations in a tumor.
This is all routine in medicine today. New discoveries are constantly uncovering new connections between genetic variations and better medical treatments to help us prevent, intercept, or treat diseases when they develop. It’s also a remarkable shift, just within the span of the current century, that has saved and extended countless lives.
Now Penn Medicine wants to do it all over again, but looking instead at the immune system—its unique patterns in individuals as it surveils, learns, and responds to threats; its common patterns in groups of people; and how to connect those patterns to more customized medical treatments or prevention. You can read more about these efforts in The Immune Health Future, Today.
Why Penn Medicine is the Leader in Immunology and Immune Health
There aren’t many other places in the world where this type of Immune Health work could get underway today. Penn has a remarkable history of leadership in an astonishing breadth of discovery for a single institution, from its role in the history of vaccine development in the past century to understanding why different people react differently to vaccines and developing new ones that protect may protect universally against all influenza viruses or coronaviruses. Penn’s leadership also notably includes developing chimeric antigen receptor T cell therapy (CAR T) that programs the body’s immune cells to fight blood cancers—and someday soon, scientists hope, other cancers and other diseases. We are living in an age of immunotherapies with wide-ranging impacts, both on patients who have already been cured of their disease, and on scientists and physicians who are still working to create better treatments. Autoimmune diseases are among the important targets of these varied approaches, with significant support totaling $60 million since 2021 from Stewart and Judy Colton powering the Colton Center for Autoimmunity at Penn.
Immune Health is an area where Penn Medicine and our partners are investing major effort because our teams have the track record and the expertise to keep growing in this area, and they have the commitment to keep putting discoveries to work. Scientists, physicians, patients, industry partners, and philanthropists all have a role in making it happen. We hope that their stories, in the Immune Health issue of Penn Medicine magazine and beyond, will help inspire you to connect with this work as it unfolds in the years ahead.