Grant: Team Grant: Human Immunology Initiative: Standardization Core

To stay healthy, we need to have an immune system that works properly: it needs to attack foreign cells, but leave our own cells alone. If our immune system attacks our cells, it causes an illness called an autoimmune disease. There are many types of autoimmune disease, including type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, celiac disease, and rheumatoid arthritis. Two million Canadians of all ages live with an autoimmune disease. Researchers and healthcare professionals are working hard to find new and better ways to treat these lifelong diseases. But we face the challenge that there is not a consistent set of established 'recipes' (called standard operating procedures, or SOPs) for the ways that researchers collect, process, and analyze samples to make discoveries or test new treatments. Here, we have brought together a Canada-wide group of experts to create the Canadian Autoimmunity Standardization Core (CAN-ASC), which will develop SOPs for the most important tests and methods that are needed by the researchers who study autoimmune diseases. We will work together and with our colleagues to produce and test the SOPs. Then we will make the SOPs available via the web and train researchers and students to use them. In this way, we will ensure that Canadian researchers have ideal methods to study what causes autoimmunity in humans and to develop new treatments that can restore normal immune system function.