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

Elvira Mass studied Biology at the University of Bonn, where she also completed her PhD at the Life and Medical Sciences (LIMES) Institute. In 2014, she joined the laboratory of Frédéric Geissmann at King’s College London and continued her postdoctoral training with him at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. She returned to Bonn in 2017 as an independent group leader at the LIMES Institute. In 2019, she was appointed Associate Professor of “Integrated Immunology” at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, before moving back to Bonn in 2020. She has been a tenured Full Professor at the LIMES Institute since 2022. Elvira Mass received an ERC Starting Grant in 2019 to investigate the impact of micro- and nanoplastics on macrophage function. Her work has been recognized with several prestigious awards, including the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize (2020), the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize for Young Researchers (2021), and selection as an EMBO Young Investigator in 2022 for her contributions to the field of macrophage biology.

Dr. Shohei Hori has long investigated the mechanisms of immunological self-tolerance, with a particular focus on regulatory T (Treg) cells. He began this work as a postdoctoral fellow at the Gulbenkian Institute for Science in Portugal, where he studied Treg cells with Prof. António Coutinho and Dr. Jocelyne Demengeot. In 2001, he returned to Japan to join the laboratory of Prof. Shimon Sakaguchi in Kyoto, where he identified Foxp3 as the master transcription factor of Treg cells. In 2004, he established his own laboratory at the RIKEN Research Center for Allergy and Immunology in Yokohama and later moved to the Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Tokyo in 2016. His current research focuses on how Treg cell identity is shaped by transcriptional and epigenetic mechanisms—including Foxp3—and how antigen specificity enables Treg cells to discriminate between self and non-self.