The Immune Alliance - a German-Japanese Cooperation in Immunology Bilateral Cooperation

Keishi Fujio earned his M.D. from the University of Tokyo’s Medical School in 1995. He obtained his Ph.D from the University of Tokyo in 2002. Following his Ph.D., he pursued research in rheumatology and clinical immunology. Since 2017, he has been the Professor and Director in Department of Allergy and Rheumatology, The University of Tokyo Hospital. He focuses on research in human immunology within the context of autoimmunity. He constructed the functional genomic database ImmuNexUT, one of the largest datasets on immune cells. He also conducted a transcriptome analysis of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) and rheumatoid arthritis (RA) synovium, resulting in the identification of an age-associated CD4+ T cell subset, termed ThA cells.

Ulf Panzer studied medicine and molecular biology in Hamburg and worked as a physician at the University Medical Center in Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE) and received post-doctoral training as an immunologist at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine in Bellinzona, Switzerland. Since 2010 he is Professor of Medicine and Division Chief of Translational Immunology in Hamburg. In 2020, he established the Hamburg Center for Translational Immunology (HCTI) allowing for interdisciplinary approaches to tackle research questions in immunology and inflammation research. He is speaker of the Collaborative Research Centre 1192 „Immune-Mediated Glomerular Diseases“. His current research interests focus on the translation of basic immunological discoveries into novel therapeutics approaches in autoimmune kidney diseases.