Autoimmune disease and allergies are an increasingly common phenomenon in the Western world. An estimated 73 million people suffer from allergies and autoimmune disease in the United States alone. To date, many of these diseases lack treatment and pose an incredible financial burden on both the patients and society.

We set out to create a preventative treatment for allergies and autoimmune disease by utilizing the innate mechanism of Central Tolerance. We’ve designed a modular plasmid based platform that will allow for inducible expression, and display, of target antigens on the membrane of Hematopoietic Stem Cells (HSCs). In our project, murine Hematopoietic Progenitor Cells (HPC-7) were used as a model for HSCs and transfected with our plasmid. Additionally, we attempted to show apoptosis in an immature B cell model (WEHI-231) as a result of our treatment, closely approximating the process of Central Tolerance. In the future this technology may be used to engineer HSCs harvested from cord blood and allow for a cost effective preventative treatment.