Year: 2023

Member Highlights

Member Highlight Interview with Alexander M. S. Barron, Ph.D. , Principal Scientist at Pfizer, Inc.

December 28, 2023

I use lessons from human diseases to make drugs that manipulate the immune system for the benefit of patients. My work starts the drug development process: I come up with ideas for new immunotherapies and the initial experimental strategy to determine whether Pfizer should develop drugs based on my ideas. I also lead teams to execute the experimental strategy and collaborate with colleagues from across Pfizer to develop biomarker, commercial, regulatory and safety strategies. And, when I’m lucky, I get to publish and present our science at Cytokines! [READ MORE]

Member Highlights

Member Highlight Interview with Ang Cui – 2023  ICIS-Christina Fleischmann Award Winner

December 28, 2023

Member Highlight Interview with Ang Cui Please tell us your name, degree, where you currently work, positionAng Cui, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Harvard University Where did you do your training?Ph.D., Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology; M.Sc., Yale UniversityB.A.Sc., University of Toronto. I completed 12 years of research training in both computational [READ MORE]

Special Article of Interest

Gigantic cytokines paper is out recently in Nature! A comprehensive study of how every immune cell type responds to each of 86 cytokines in vivo at single-cell resolution

December 15, 2023

Over a million studies have highlighted the central role of cytokines in immune function, yet we never had a comprehensive view of how every immune cell type responds to every cytokine. The large number of immune cell types and cytokines and complex cellular responses make it challenging.

In the recent Nature paper “Dictionary of immune responses to cytokines at single-cell resolution” (Cui et al., Nature 2023), the Immune Dictionary was created. This is a large-scale compendium of single-cell transcriptomic profiles of more than 17 immune cell types in response to each of 86 cytokines (>1,400 cytokine–cell type combinations) in mouse lymph nodes in vivo. The dictionary revealed many immune cell responses to cytokines that were previously uncharacterized. Based on this dictionary, they developed companion software, Immune Response Enrichment Analysis (IREA), that allows any researcher to assess cytokine activities, immune cell polarization, and cytokine networks from gene expression data. The dictionary generates new hypotheses for cytokine functions, illuminates pleiotropic effects of cytokines, expands our knowledge of activation states of each immune cell type, and provides a framework to deduce the roles of specific cytokines and cell–cell communication networks in any immune response. [READ MORE]

Members in the News

Announcement of Cytokines 2023 Local Organizing Committee Member Irini Sereti as Chief of the combined LIR and LMM at NIH/NIAID

December 15, 2023

Dr Steven Holland, Scientific Director of NIAID announced announce the selection of Dr. Irini Sereti as the new Chief of the combined Laboratories of Immunoregulation (LIR), previously led by Dr Fauci, and Molecular Microbiology (LMM), led by Dr Malcolm Martin. Irini is currently Chief of the HIV Pathogenesis Section in the LIR, where she leads an innovative program on HIV pathogenesis and immune reconstitution. These now combined laboratories have largely defined and led the fields of HIV and AIDS research from the very beginning of the HIV pandemic. She was identified in a competitive national search.
[READ MORE]

Members in the News

ICIS Member Seth Masters to head the Centre for Innate Immunity and Infectious Diseases (CiiiD) at Hudson Institute of Medical Research

December 15, 2023

Hudson Institute’s world leading inflammation programs enter a new era with the appointment of Professor Seth Masters to head the Centre for Innate Immunity and Infectious Diseases (CiiiD).

An expert in genetic disorders that trigger inflammatory diseases, Prof Masters has spent the past 12 years as Head of the Inflammasomes and Autoinflammatory Disease Laboratory at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute (WEHI). [READ MORE]

President's Letter

President’s New Year Message

December 15, 2023

As 2023 winds to a close, there are lots of exciting events on the Cytokine Society horizon. First, plans are firming up for the 2024 ICIS meeting in Seoul, Korea, which will be held in partnership with the Korean Association of Immunologists (KAI). We are thrilled to report that one of the Keynote Lecturers will be Dr. Drew Weissman, winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2023/weissman/facts). Acceptances are pouring in with over 80% positive response rate so far (click here to view confirmed speakers as of today). This is shaping up to be a fantastic conference, and kudos to Drs. You-Me Kim and Sang-Il Lee, the lead organizers. [READ MORE]

Members in the News

Do you have information you would like to share in a future issue?

December 14, 2023

Inviting all ICIS Members to share their promotions, publications, mini-bios, meeting announcements, industry news, career opportunities, or other news of interest to the cytokine & interferon research community. Also, if you have a few minutes to provide a Member Highlights interview, please contact Joan Oefner joefner@cytokinesociety.org for inclusion in a future bimonthly issue of Signals+. Deadlines are the 1st and the 15th of each month. To find out more about industry ads, please click here ADVERTISE. [READ MORE]