The Institute for Immunology and Informatics(iCubed) was established in 2008 under the leadership of Annie De Groot, M.D. and Denice Spero, Ph.D., as part of the University of Rhode Island’s emerging Biotechnology Program. The Institute maintains offices and laboratory space in the historic Shepard Building as part of URI’s Feintstein Providence Campus.
The Institute applies cutting-edge bioinformatic tools to accelerate the development of treatments and cures for a number of diseases such as hepatitis C, lyme disease and Dengue fever. The Institute also aims to quickly make these tools available to the global research community for the development of vaccines for other infectious diseases.
iCubed’s research focuses on new and safer vaccines, new methods of predicting and treating adverse immune responses, and improving tolerance in the case of transplantation. iCubed supports a wide variety of training efforts that will provide opportunities to teach the next generation the tools for effective vaccine design. For more information on the training sessions now available, please visit our Events page.
Mission: To improve human and animal health by applying the power of immunomics (informatics, genomics and immunology) to the design of better vaccines, diagnostics, and therapeutics.
Vision: The vision of the founding members of the Institute for Immunology and Informatics is to develop Rhode Island into a globally recognized center for Biotechnology Vaccine Research. We anticipate that Rhode Island will achieve international standing for scientific contributions in both vaccine research and research on adverse reactions to protein drugs.
Focus: To conduct research at the interface between new immunology discoveries, new informatics technologies and prevention and treatment of human and animal disease.
