The award will allow the La Jolla researcher to pursue innovative therapeutics for cancers, infectious diseases and chronic inflammation.

The National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has awarded La Jolla Institute for Immunology instructor Haoyang Li $4.5 million to guide the development of new therapeutics that boost the immune system’s fighting power against tumors and infections.

The funding from the prestigious  Stephen I. Katz Early Stage Investigator Research Project Grant will help Li understand how interleukin-1 receptor 8 (IL-1R8) works.

IL-1R8 is an “immunomodulatory” molecule, which means it helps control inflammation, a condition that can trigger and accelerate autoimmune diseases and organ disorders.

By capturing high-resolution, structural images of IL-1R8, Li will be better positioned to understand how the molecule functions, and what other molecules IL-1R8 works with.

“Structure studies are the basis for this very new therapeutic target and direction,” Li said in a press release. “We want to design the next-generation antibodies to tune the functions of IL-1R8 in different pathological conditions. We just need the blueprint to do that.”

The antibodies that Li plans to engineer with his new understanding might allow doctors to boost immune cell responses in local tissues, rather than across the entire body, allowing scientists to precisely block IL-1R8 to help immune cells fight a tumor or other harbinger of disease without triggering inflammation in healthy tissues.

Li is also looking for ways to activate IL-1R8 in local tissues or organs to reduce chronic inflammation and treat autoimmune diseases, where inflammatory immune cells start attacking the body’s own organs.