On Nov. 1, 2004, an Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) research team announced that it was one of only 14 teams around the U.S. that were chosen to help the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) look for proteins that activate the body’s immune response to emerging infectious diseases.

NIAID’s goal was to creating a central public database of T cell and B cell – another form of immune response cell – antigens and epitopes that researchers can access when working on vaccine development.