SBIR Phase I: A Platform to Decode Disease-Specific Immune Responses to Accelerate Drug Discovery and Clinical Decision-Making

Award ID: 2604271

The broader/commercial impact of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to enable a new way to understand how the human immune system responds to infections, vaccines, and disease. Current tools cannot easily identify which immune cells recognize specific disease targets, limiting progress in developing effective treatments. This project will attempt to create a technology that precisely identifies and measures disease-specific immune responses. The innovation may improve understanding of how immune responses differ across individuals and conditions, helping distinguish protective from harmful responses. This knowledge can accelerate vaccine development, improve therapeutic discovery, and support more personalized medicine approaches to treating chronic and infectious diseases. Commercially, the technology addresses a major unmet need in immune monitoring and drug development, where better tools are required to guide decisions and reduce costly clinical failures. By providing a scalable and practical solution, this project has the potential to support a growing biotechnology market while improving human health outcomes. The proposed project addresses the challenge of identifying antigen-specific B cell responses and linking them to functional antibody activity. Antigens are molecules that trigger immune responses, and B cells are immune cells that produce antibodies targeting those antigens. Existing methods either measure antibody binding without identifying the cells that produce them or sequence immune cells without determining what they recognize. The objective is to develop an integrated system that selectively activates and expands antigen-specific B cells using controlled antigen presentation and programmable co-stimulation. The system will be evaluated by measuring activation, proliferation, antibody secretion, and antigen-specific enrichment under defined conditions. Additional studies will assess whether B cell receptor sequences can be recovered and linked to antigen specificity and functional activity. The expected outcome is a reproducible platform that generates antigen-resolved immune datasets connecting immune cell identity, function, and specificity. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Program Director: Erik Pierstorff