The Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, has announced a four-year, $20 million gift from the Zurich-based NOMIS Foundation to support research at the intersection of the human immune and nervous systems and the role it plays in health and disease.

The gift will launch the Neuroimmunology Initiative, housed within the institute’s NOMIS Center for Immunobiology and Microbial Pathogenesis, which will encompass two interconnected research programs: how the immune system and inflammation affect the nervous system; and how the nervous system modulates immune responses throughout the body. The gift will support research programs, faculty recruitment, and pilot grants, as well as a neuroimmunology symposium where leaders in the field can share ideas, seek feedback, and build new collaborations.

The gift helps to advance the institute’s Campaign for Discovery, a seven-year, $750 million comprehensive fundraising campaign. Previous gifts from the foundation helped create the NOMIS Center in 2008 and have funded research projects, supported postdoctoral trainees, and enabled faculty recruitment.

“We are deeply grateful to the NOMIS Foundation for investing in neuroimmunology and in Salk,” said Salk president Gerald Joyce. “This funding will allow us to tackle currently unaddressed scientific questions, opening fundamentally new areas of scientific inquiry across human health and disease, and paving the way toward innovative therapeutic interventions for a wide range of disorders that have both a neurological and immunological component, such as Alzheimer’s disease, ALS, long COVID, and some forms of cancer.”

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