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

Yosuke Togashi earned his M.D. from Kyoto University School of Medicine in 2006 and initially worked as a clinician in the Department of Respiratory Medicine. After serving as an Assistant Professor at Kyoto University, he obtained his Ph.D. in Genome Biology at Kindai University in 2015. His early career was distinguished by a research fellowship at the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. He subsequently began basic and translational research in cancer immunology as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Cancer Center (Nishikawa Lab) in 2016. Since 2021, he has been a Professor at Okayama University, focusing on translational research of the tumor microenvironment. Additionally, he has been a Professor at OKAYAMA UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL, Department of Allergy and Respiratory Medicine, concurrently since 2024. His recent work includes biomarker research on regulatory T cells, and studies on exhausted T cells using single-cell sequencing. He has also investigated the metabolic landscape of the tumor microenvironment, particularly focusing on mitochondrial biology.

Markus Feuerer studied medicine in Mainz and Heidelberg (Germany). He was a postdoctoral research fellow at the German Rheumatology Research Center (DRFZ) and Charité University Clinic, Berlin, (Germany), and at the Joslin Diabetes Center and Harvard Medical School (Boston, USA). After his postdoctoral time, he was head of an independent Helmholtz Young Investigator Group at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg. He is now head of the Research Division Immunology at the newly established Leibniz Institute for Immunotherapy (LIT) in Regensburg and Deputy Scientific Director of the LIT. In addition, he is a Professor of Immunology and head of the Chair for Immunology at the University of Regensburg.
Research interest:
– Immune regulation, regulatory T cells
– Tissue immunology: tissue-resident immune cell differentiation and tissue repair and homeostasis by immune cells
– Immune responses against tumors and autoimmunity
– Synthetic immunology, engineered immune cells as “living drugs”