NIAID TETRAMER FACILITY

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This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. Primary support for the subproject and the subproject's principal investigator may have been provided by other sources, including other NIH sources. The Total Cost listed for the subproject likely represents the estimated amount of Center infrastructure utilized by the subproject, not direct funding provided by the NCRR grant to the subproject or subproject staff. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) supports reagent programs and repositories that provide centralized resources for the research community. These facilities support research by providing reliable sources of quality assured materials, specimens, or experimental animals at reasonable cost to qualified investigators. The NIAID Tetramer Facility, established at Emory University in 1998 under the direction of John Altman, Ph.D., serves the scientific community as a centralized source of quality-controlled tetramer reagents for basic, preclinical, and clinical research. The NIAID Division of AIDS oversees the Facility, which is contracted by the AIDS Research and Reference Reagent Program with subcontracts to McKesson BioServices and Virginia Mason. The Facility has provided tetramer reagents, comprising human, murine, and non-human primate MHC alleles to researchers at non-profit organizations both in the U.S. and abroad, including investigators supported by ten NIH Institutes, the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Defense, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and private non-profit U.S. foundations, as well as to researchers in Europe, Australia, Israel, and Canada; has produced tetramers applicable to a wide range of T cell studies, including research on AIDS and other infectious diseases, cancer, organ transplantation, autoimmunity, clinical vaccine evaluation, and basic studies on T cells and immune responses; and has developed standardized methodology for tetramer usage and evaluated new advances in tetramer design and production to assure that the Facility's reagents reflect state-of-the-art capabilities.