In 2014, the National Institutes of Health awarded a $4 million grant to La Jolla Institute to build an immune cell epigenome-database and make it freely available to researchers worldwide. The Database of Immune Cell Epigenomes (DICE) is designed to give researchers insights into how genes act within the immune system to set it in motion.
Created under a multi-million dollar competitive contract from the National Institutes of Health, the Immune Epitope Database (IEDB) contains information on how the immune system responds to a wide range of infectious organisms, allergy-causing substances and other things that stimulate the immune system. Rapidly emerging and persistent infectious diseases, such as Ebola, influenza, malaria and most recently, SARS-CoV-2, as well as ongoing bioterrorism concerns, make the epitope database a critical tool in the fight to improve and safeguard global public health.