Imprint Labs, a new nonprofit initiative, announced it has raised $15 million in philanthropic funding to advance its work to decode the body’s immune memory and uncover the causes of chronic diseases.
Value proposition: Millions of people suffer from immunological diseases and other chronic conditions that could be linked with immunological triggers. And some autoimmune diseases, which impact 50+ million Americans, are initially triggered by infections, injuries, and tumors. And some patients with acute COVID-19 infections go on to develop long COVID. Emerging evidence suggests that a significant subset of the nearly 1 billion cases of mental illness worldwide stems from underlying immunological causes.
The initial causes of chronic conditions, like triggering infections, can occur years before the diagnosis of the chronic disease itself. Longitudinal studies to identify these triggers are often prohibitively expensive or logistically infeasible. For example, one recent study linked Epstein-Barr virus and multiple sclerosis, using a database of 10 million people followed over 20 years. Since the immune system carries an imprint of everything it encounters, a snapshot of disease information stored in memory immune cells could offer an inexpensive method to infer what triggered a disease.
Imprint: Imprint, a Focused Research Organization (FRO) catalyzed by Convergent Research, is pioneering new technologies for identifying what triggers conditions like autoimmune disease, long COVID, and neuropsychiatric disorders by decoding the historical information stored in immune cells.
Imprint builds tools to reconstruct immune histories from memory B cells and T cells at scale. This forensic immunology approach looks to unlock the secrets held within memory immune cells, which contain an archive of all immune exposures throughout a person’s life, essentially a web browser history of diseases and their hidden triggers. And unlike an individual’s genes, the relevant signal stored in the immune repertoire is distributed, sparse, and constantly evolving, making it more difficult to resolve than the genome.
Imprint received philanthropic support from Eric and Wendy Schmidt, Convergent Research, Peter Reinhart, and the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC). And NYCEDC has selected Imprint as a 2025 LifeSci NYC Expansion Fund awardee, a funding opportunity for high-growth life sciences companies interested in expanding their operations in New York City. The LifeSci NYC Expansion Fund is supported by LifeSci NYC, a $1 billion initiative overseen by NYCEDC to position New York City as the global leader in life sciences and grow the ecosystem to 40,000 jobs over the next 15 years.
Along with the funding support provided by the city, Imprint was incubated by Cornell Tech, one of the city’s premier research institutions.
KEY QUOTES:
“We may not know what’s causing chronic disease – but the immune system probably does. In addition to being an army, the immune system is also an archive. We founded Imprint on the thesis that the immune system’s historical archive can be accessed and translated to identify unknown causes of chronic disease, enabling the development of diagnostics, treatments, and even cures.”
Beck Brachman, PhD, CEO and co-founder of Imprint, last month from the TED stage
“Foundational datasets and new machine learning approaches are required to decode the immune archive at scale. Current efforts largely focus on how antibodies recognize single targets, but important disease signatures can only be detected by investigating the immune system as a whole.” Imprint’s forensic tools and methodology will ultimately allow researchers to reconstruct individualized immune repertoires, identify patterns within and between patients’ unique immune repertoires, and explore relationships between immune exposures and chronic conditions like long COVID, multiple sclerosis, and depression. Initial funding will be used to establish Imprint’s high-throughput data generation pipeline, build its first computational tool, and pilot disease applications.
Victor Greiff, PhD, co-founder and Director of Computational Immunology at Imprint
“We built Convergent Research to support FROs, like Imprint, that are moonshot efforts to create new tools and datasets that will close critical gaps and massively advance our ability to do science. The immune record is a robust system that we still can’t read, and our scientific tests often come up short when we inquire into the root causes and mechanisms of chronic illnesses, especially when it comes to what we now think of as brain diseases. Researchers need better tools, and that’s why it’s so exciting that the brilliant team at Imprint is at work to bridge that critical gap in our immunological understanding.”
Adam Marblesone, PhD, co-founder and CEO at Convergent Research
“New York City is cementing itself as a global leader in life sciences and paving the way for cutting-edge innovation – like the work happening at Imprint – to emerge right here in the heart of the city. We are proud to support trailblazing companies like Imprint whose groundbreaking work will help accelerate scientific discovery and life science jobs in NYC, while uncovering the cause of chronic diseases and enabling people all around the globe to live longer.”
NYCEDC Chief Strategy Officer Cecilia Kushner
“Imprint exemplifies the kind of bold, translational science we champion at Cornell Tech’s Runway Program — science that moves beyond the lab to deliver real impact. By decoding the immune system’s memory, Imprint is unlocking a frontier of discovery that could change how we diagnose, treat, and even prevent chronic disease. We’re proud to have helped Dr. Brachman catalyze this vision and to support the computational and scientific infrastructure that will drive a deeper understanding of autoimmune and neuropsychiatric disorders.”
Dr. Fernando Gomez-Baquero, Director of the Runway Startup Postdoc and Spinout Program at Cornell Tech and member of Imprint’s Board of Directors
