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

Ichiro Taniuchi earned his M.D. from Faculty of Medicine, Osaka University in 1989, and obtained his Ph.D. from Kyushu University in 1996. Following his Ph.D., he pursued research in molecular and developmental immunology, particularly Cd4 gene regulation. Since 2004, he has been PI for laboratory for transcriptional regulation, RIKEN. His research interest is how development and function of the immune system is regulated at the transcriptional level. He has been working to understand roles of transcription factors, such as Runx family proteins, in regulating immune cell development. His particular interest is how fate decision by T cell precursors in the thymus is regulated under T cell receptor signaling. Dr. Taniuchi received Japanese Society of Immunology award in 2013.

Carmen Gerlach holds a Bachelor and Master of Science in Biomedical Sciences from Leiden University in Leiden, the Netherlands. During her doctoral training under supervision of Ton Schumacher at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam, she co-developed a single-cell fate mapping technology, cellular barcoding, which she subsequently used to track the fate of singe naïve CD8+ T cells during in vivo immune responses to acute infections (Gerlach et al. J Exp Med 2010 | Gerlach & Rohr et al. Science 2013). During her postdoctoral research under supervision of Ulrich von Andrian at Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA, she delineated and characterized a novel subset of memory CD8 T cells, the ‘peripheral memory cells (Tpm)’ (Gerlach & Moseman & Loughhead et al. Immunity 2016). Subsequently, she spent 8 months as Visiting Scholar in Nir Yosef’s lab at the University of California Berkeley, USA, to gain insights into computational immunology.

She started her independent research group as Assistant Professor end 2017 at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, where she now holds since 2022 a Principal Researcher position. In April 2025 she was recruited as W3 Professor to the University of Regensburg and the Leibniz Institute for Immunotherapy in Regensburg, Germany.

The Gerlach lab is dedicated to understanding diversification within CD8+ T cell responses with the long-term goal to improve immunotherapy and vaccination. Recent work bridges murine and human immunology to facilitate cross-species translation of findings. We provide an easy-to-use strategy to obtain fine-graded information on T cell functional and migratory capacities that identifies cells of the same properties in mice and humans (Zwijnenburg et al. Immunity 2023 | Pokharel & Shryki et al. Eur J Immunol 2024).