Focus on Immunology

We're constantly growing our expertise in Immunology so that we can continue to discover and develop innovative medicines for patients living with debilitating diseases, such as systemic lupus erythematosus, rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, inflammatory bowel disease, and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.

At Genentech our research and discovery efforts into aspects of innate and adaptive immunity are applied to the understanding and treatment of autoimmune, inflammatory and fibrotic disorders. Studying how interactions between the immune system, stromal and epithelial cells, and the environment can become dysregulated in specialized tissues underlies our strategy to develop novel therapies for the treatment of autoimmune, inflammatory, and fibrotic diseases. We rely on human patient samples and biomarker data from observational and interventional clinical trials to define the pathogenic mechanisms and mechanistically distinct patient subsets underlying unmet medical needs in complex chronic diseases.

Key Publications

Science Signal, April 2017
The kinase TPL2 activates ERK and p38 signaling to promote neutrophilic inflammation
Nature, December 2015
Therapeutic antibodies reveal Notch control of transdifferentation in the adult lung
Nature, October 2015
Caspase-11 cleaves gasdermin D for non-canonical inflammasome signalling
Science Translational Medicine, August 2015
TH2 and TH17 inflammatory pathways are reciprocally regulated in asthma
Nature, October 2014
Interleukin-22 alleviates metabolic disorders and restores mucosal immunity in diabetes
Nature, February 2014
A Crohn’s disease variant in Atg16l1 enhances its degradation by caspase 3
Nature, February 2014
Genetics of rheumatoid arthritis contributes to biology and drug discovery