Andrew Baker

Andrew Baker is Professor of Molecular Medicine at the Glasgow University. His major topic is the modification of gene delivery system to achieve efficient and tissue specific delivery of agents relevant for cardiovascular disease. This involves the development of adenoviruses and adeno-associated viruses to both remove their natural cell infection processes and also incorporate new tropism to direct the virus to target cells.

Chris A. Benedict

Chris A. Benedict, Ph.D., studies various molecular strategies that viruses employ to modulate host immune defenses at the La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology, USA. He focuses mainly on viral targeting of signaling pathways initiated by cytokines of the tumor necrosis factor (TNF) and interferon (IFN) families, which regulate both cell death and multiple aspects of the host inflammatory response.

Thomas Brocker


	Professor Thomas Brocker is Head of the Institute for Immunology of the LMU in Munich. He is especially interested in the role of DCs in induction of immunity and tolerance. By the use of various animal models the development, function and biology of DCs is analyzed.

Roberto Cattaneo

Roberto Cattaneo is full Professor for Biochemistry and Microbiology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, USA and chair of the Infectious Diseases and Vaccines committee of the American Society for Gene Therapy. He is a leading virologist in the field of negative strand RNA viruses, especially measles virus. One focus of his reseach is retargeting measles virus for oncolytic virotherapy by using reverse genetic systems.

Karl-Klaus Conzelmann

Karl-Klaus Conzelmann is Professor at the LMU (Max von Pettenkofer Institute & Gene Center). His lab is studying rhabdoviruses and paramyxoviruses like rabies and measles to learn how they trick the host immune system and exploit cellular machineries for virus replication and assembly. A key technology in this approach is the genetic engineering of these RNA viruses on cDNA level (reverse genetics) which was developed in Conzelmann’s lab.

Mark Dudley


	Mark Dudley is currently the head of the Cell Production Facility at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, USA, where the main interest is to establish successful gene therapies and cell based treatments for patients with advanced melanoma and other cancers. He was one of the first to successfully transfer autologous T-cell-receptor transduced PBL in patients with melanoma.

Adolfo Garcia-Sastre


	Adolfo García-Sastre is currently working at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, USA. His focus is on the innate immune recognition of influenza virus and its ability to evade immune responses. He identified the influenza virus NS1 protein that binds to double-stranded RNA and RIG-I thereby inhibiting efficient interferon induction by the infected host cell.

Wolfgang Hammerschmidt

Wolfgang Hammerschmidt is working at the Helmholtz Center Munich. A current focus of his work is the regulation of the biphasic life cycle of Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV), thereby trying to unravel the question as to why newly infected B cells establish a strictly latent infection before the virus can switch to the lytic phase, when progeny virus is produced and released. It is of major interest to clarify the contribution of epigenetic mechanisms like DNA methylation to the regulation of this process.

Karl-Peter Hopfner

Karl-Peter Hopfner is a professor in the Department of Biochemistry Gene Center at the University of Munich. The main interest of his research is to reveal structural and functional mechanisms of protein:nucleic acid complexes and multiprotein assemblies. His lab uses a combination of X-ray crystallography, in vivo and in vitro functional analysis to study in a variety of topics including DNA damage and repair, chromatin remodeling and recognition of non-self RNA and DNA in infected cells.

Veit Hornung

Prof. Hornung holds a professorship for Clinical Biochemistry at the Institute for Clinical Chemistry and Pharmacology in Bonn. Cytosolic pattern recognition receptors as well as the activation of the inflammasome complex have been the recent major focus of Prof. Hornung’s studies. Currently his group focuses on RIG-I-mediated recognition of RNA viruses and the role of a AIM2, a novel dsDNA receptor, during activation of the inflammasome.

Marc A.Kay

Professor Mark Kay is currently working at the Departments of Pediatrics and Genetics at the Stanford University. He is vice chair for basic research (pediatrics) and director of the program for Human Gene Therapy. The main topic of his work is the development of viral and non-viral vectors for gene therapeutic approaches mainly for clinical trails. In the last years he also focused on miRNAs and how they regulate mammalian gene expression.

Ludger Klein


	Tolerance to ”self” is a fundamental property of the immune system. Selection processes in the thymus are essential for the generation of a self-tolerant T cell repertoire, either through removal of potentially dangerous T cells or through the induction of regulatory T cells. Our aim is to understand how the thymic microenvironment orchestrates these cell fate decisions.

Antonio Lanzavecchia

Antonio Lanzavecchia is the founding director of the Institute for Research in Biomedicine in Bellinzona, Switzerland, since 1999 and professor of Human Immunology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich since 2009. Furthermore, he has been teaching Immunology at the University of Genoa and Siena. His research has covered several aspects of immunology: antigen processing and presentation, dendritic cell biology, lymphocyte activation and traffic and, more recently, the cellular basis of T and B cell memory and the production of human monoclonal antibodies.

Paul Lieberman

Paul Lieberman is working at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia. His research is focused on Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV) and Kaposi’s sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV) and how these viruses can efficiently remain in a latent stage in human immune cells. The control of EBV DNA replication and maintenance in latently infected cells and the contribution of chromatin modifications to the regulation of latency in EBV and KSHV are his major interests.

Michel Nussenzweig


	Michel C. Nussenzweig, M.D., Ph.D., is the Sherman Fairchild Professor at the Rockefeller University in New York, USA and Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His research focuses on the molecular aspects of adaptive and innate immune responses, mainly on B lymphocytes and antibodies for adaptive immunity and on dendritic cells in his studies of innate immunity.

Peter Palese

Peter Palese is the Chair of the Department of Microbiology at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, USA. His work focuses on the biology of RNA viruses including influenza viruses, especially in the interplay between virus and host. He was awarded with the Robert-Koch-Prize in 2006 for his fundamental work on influenza viruses. Dr. Palese is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Vincent Racaniello

Vincent Racaniello, Ph.D. is Higgins Professor of Microbiology & Immunology at the Columbia University, New York. He works on polio- and other picornaviruses with a current focus on innate immunity. He is author of the famous textbook "Principles in Virology". Recently he established the weekly netcast "This Week in Virology" (www.twiv.tv) which is one of the most popular downloads in the iTunes medicine section. At this symposium, Vincent Racaniello will moderate a live TWiV discussion which will be published as a TWiV episode.

Alan Rickinson

Alan Rickinson has been working at the Cancer Research UK Institute for Cancer Studies at the University of Birmingham since 1983 and is a world expert for Epstein-Barr virus (EBV). He and his lab investigate viral pathogenesis in B cell lymphomas, the presentation of viral antigens and the T cell response to viral infection, using this information to develop new treatments for EBV-positive malignancies.

Jürgen Ruland


	Prof. Dr. Jürgen Ruland is head of the Institute for Molecular Immunology at the Technical University of Munich and of the Laboratory of Signaling in the Immune System at the Helmholtz Zentrum München. His main interests are signaling pathways that link innate immune recognition to inflammatory responses and the molecular mechanisms of lymphomagenesis.

Ken Shortman

Professor Shortman’s main research objectives are to understand how specialized types of DC develop from bone marrow stem cells and to identify DC surface molecules involved in DC signaling functions. These molecules can be used as targets to manipulate immune responses and improve the effectiveness of vaccines. He is currently working at the The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (Immunology Division), Melbourne, Australia.

Marc Veldhoen

Our lab studies the role that cells of the immune-system play at the initiation, modulation and resolution of immune-responses at epithelial barrier sites. These studies provide insights into the mechanisms that control the maintenance of a resident population of micro-organisms, promoting healthy living, and the prevention of undesirable immune-responses resulting in chronic infections, allergies, autoimmunity and an increased risk of cancer.