Month: May 2024

ICIS Member and 2019 Milstein Award Winner, Professor Akiko Iwasaki, renowned immunologist, has been named to both the TIME100 and TIME100 Health, two of Time Magazine’s lists of the most influential people of 2024. The honor recognizes her pioneering research into post-acute infection syndromes like LongCOVID. [READ MORE]

Dr. Georg Schett, a world renown rheumatologist at the University Hospital Erlangen in Germany who chaired Cytokines 20219 in Vienna, has been named to Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in Health for 2024 for his work using CAR T therapy to treat Autoimmune Diseases. Dr. Schett saw the potential of new immune-based therapy CAR T which dramatically improved outcomes for patients with certain blood cancers that involve B cells, like leukemia and lymphoma, as a promising treatment for autoimmune diseases like lupus, in which immune B cells attack the body’s own cells. He performed the first CAR T treatments on five patients with the disease in 2022. Eight months after receiving the therapy, all five were in remission and no longer needed powerful immunosuppressive drugs to control their disease. Last year, Schett published a second groundbreaking study showing that another small group of patients receiving the therapy were still in remission more than two years later without immunosuppressive drugs. [READ MORE]