Yale School of Medicine has been awarded $10 million by the Blavatnik Family Foundation for an initiative examining inflammation and its effects on immune activity and health.
The project will examine how infections, environmental conditions and the microbiome influence immune activity, with work spanning fetal development and brain health. Researchers also plan to study gut-brain connections at the cellular and molecular levels. Yale announced the award Oct. 28.
Ruslan Medzhitov, a Sterling Professor of Immunobiology, will serve as director. Noah Palm, Liza Konnikova and Akiko Iwasaki are also named as initiative leaders. The grant will establish the Blavatnik Graduate and Postdoctoral Fellows program for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers.
Medzhitov said philanthropic funding enables “creative, high-risk research” that rigid federal funding structures often constrain. Yale said the foundation has supported biomedical research at the university for more than a decade.
The university’s 2013 record describes an earlier, separate $10 million award from Blavatnik for Yale immunobiology research. Medzhitov and Richard Flavell led that work, which focused on inflammation and chronic disease.
