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

Hiroshi Kawamoto graduated from Faculty of Medicine, Kyoto University, in 1986, and worked as a physician in hospital for three years. He took his doctor course in Hematology Department of Kyoto University from 1989, and then joined Prof. Yoshimoto Katsura’s laboratory in Chest Disease Institute (currently LiMe) from 1994 to 2001 as a visiting researcher, where he started to study the early hematopoiesis and T cell development. In 2001, He became an assistant professor of Prof. Nagahiro Minato’s laboratory in Faculty of Medicine, Kyoto University. He was then promoted to be a team leader of RIKEN Research Center for Allergy and Immunology, Yokohama, in 2002. In RIKEN, in parallel with the basic research, he has started the study on development of cell therapy using T cells regenerated from pluripotent stem cells. He moved to Kyoto University as a professor at Institute for Frontier Life and Medical Sciences, in 2012. The institute was reorganized into Institute for Frontier Life and Medical Sciences through a merger with Virus Research Institute in 2016, and was renamed Institute for Life and Medical Sciences (LiMe) in 2016. In 2020, he got a cross-appointment position in Fujita Health University as a professor at International Center for Cell and Gene Therapy. Since 2022, he has been the director of LiMe.

Andreas Diefenbach studied Medicine at the University of Erlangen. After obtaining his doctoral degree in Microbiology and Immunology, he received postdoctoral training at the University of California Berkeley. He held faculty positions at the Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine, New York University, at the University of Freiburg and at the Johannes-Gutenberg-University Mainz. Since 2016, Andreas is Professor and Chair of the Institute of Microbiology, Infectious Diseases and Immunology at Charité and the Founding Director of the Berlin Centre for the Biology of Health, a joint research institute of Charité and Free University Berlin devoted to understanding the molecular mechanisms that maintain health. He also is a Senior Group Leader at the German Rheumatism Research Center, A Leibniz Institute. His lab studies development and function of the innate immune system and is particularly interested in understanding how the innate immune system coordinates adaptation of multicellular organisms to their environments (e.g., microbiota, nutrients). Research in the Diefenbach laboratory is supported by the European Research Council and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). He is the coordinator of the DFG Priority Program 1937 (“Innate Lymphoid Cells”). Since 2017, he is recognized as a Highly Cited Researchers (Clarivate Analytics) in the field of Immunology. Andreas is an elected member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences.