PhD Program Molecular, Cellular and Clinical Allergology

Seminar Invitation

“Why the joints?”
Synovial cells translate systemic autoimmunity into joint destruction

Prof. Dr. med. Thomas Kamradt
Director of the Institute of Immunology, Universitätsklinikum Jena,
Germany

Host: Winfried F. Pickl

Biosketch:
Thomas Kamradt studied Medicine in Cologne, Vienna and Berlin from 1977–1984. He was a resident at the Department of Medicine, University of Bonn, from 1985–1989. From 1989 – 1991 he was a Post-doc at the MIT in Cambridge, MA, where he worked on T cell tolerance. From 1991- 1994 he was Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Clinical Immunology and Rheumatology at Tufts Medical School in Boston, MA, where he worked on chronic Lyme Arthritis induced by infection with Borrelia burgdorferi. From 1994 – 2004 he was a research group leader at the Deutsches Rheumaforschungszentrum (DRFZ) in Berlin where he worked on T cell differentiation and autoimmune diseases triggered by infections. During that time he and his group described a subset of T cells that produce IL-17 and GM-CSF but not IFN or IL-4 and characterised T1/ST2 (the IL-33R) as a functionally relevant molecule of Th2 cells. From 1995 – 2003 he held a joint appointment at the Charité Hospital’s Division of Clinical Immunology and Rheumatology and obtained his board certification in Internal Medicine. Since 2004 he has been the Head of the Institute of Immunology at the University Hospital Jena were he and his group continue to work on autoimmune arthritis and the biology of IL-33 and its receptor.