On Jun. 11, 2026, the University of Oklahoma (OU) announced it had received an $11.5 million award from the National Institutes of Health to establish the Oklahoma Center of ImmunoEngineering, a new research center designed to accelerate the study and treatment of diseases rooted in the immune system.

The five-year Phase I award, funded through National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence program, will build a statewide immunoengineering research network and establish two specialized research cores at OU. The center is led by principal investigators Wei Chen, Ph.D., and Chongle Pan, Ph.D.

Immunoengineering applies engineering tools and principles to analyze and manipulate the immune system — dialing its activity up or down depending on the disease. For cancer or viral infection, the goal is to amplify the immune response. For autoimmune diseases, the goal is to suppress them. The field generates significant volumes of data, and making sense of that data is increasingly where new discoveries are made.

To support those discoveries, the center will house two research cores that operate in close coordination: the Immunomodulation Technology Core, which supports experimental laboratory work, and the Omics Data Science Core, which provides the computational tools and expertise to design experiments, manage large-scale data collection and interpret results.

Founded in 1890, the University of Oklahoma is a public research university located in Norman, Oklahoma. As the state’s flagship university, OU serves the educational, cultural, economic and health care needs of the state, region and nation.