Immunoengineering is a young and vibrant field that seeks to improve human health via cutting-edge analysis, manipulation, and engineering of the immune system. Strong, focused immune responses are essential to fight infections, while inappropriate immune responses or inflammation are central to the onset and progression of cancer, heart disease, neurodegeneration and allergy/autoimmunity. Grounded in decades of work in fundamental immunology, the past decade has seen a spike in integration of principles from engineering and the physical sciences into immunological research. The field of Immunoengineering has already led to breakthrough immunotherapies, including the development of patient-specific engineered T cells (CAR T cells) and other engineered therapies to fight tumors that were named the 2013 Breakthrough of the Year by Science Magazine. Simultaneously, engineered vaccines have been making headway in biomaterials and nanomaterials labs, and are now in a growing number of clinical trials, including for SARS-CoV-2, Ebola, and other urgent global health concerns.

This brand-new Gordon Research Conference is designed to bring together the broader Immunoengineering community into a unique conference “home”. The conference is designed to foster meaningful discussions and interactions between immunologists, clinicians, engineers, chemists, physicists, mathematicians, and systems biologists. Our goal is to share advances and facilitate fundamental and translational science, catalyze new ideas, and spark collaborations. We will feature progress made at the molecular, cellular, and tissue scales to alter the immune response in vivo and ex vivo; technologies developed to mimic or analyze the complex, multi-scale processes that determine immunity; and strategies to enable better drug prediction and screening and to test mechanistic hypotheses.

We invite you to join in making the 2022 Immunoengineering GRC a landmark event in the development of this field. You will be joining an interdisciplinary group of researchers at all career stages and many nationalities. Bring your ideas, enthusiasm, questions, and openness to new ideas and collaboration, as we help shape the future of the community and the field.