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Inga Koneczny receives Young Investigator Award at CORA 2019 in Florence

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(Vienna, 21 March 2019) Inga Koneczny, neuroscientist from MedUni Vienna's Institute of Neurology was presented with the Young Investigator Award at the 5th International Congress on Controversies in Rheumatology & Autoimmunity (CORA 2019) in Florence for her specialist lecture entitled "A new classification system for IgG4 Autoantibodies".

Inga Koneczny impressed the jury with her lecture, in which she outlined her new classification system for IgG4 autoantibodies. IgG4 antibodies normally play a protective role in the body, but in recent years, an increased number of autoimmune diseases are found to be associated with IgG4 antibodies and in many of these diseases it is not clear whether IgG4 is actually causing disease or not. Using her new classification system, it is now possible to test whether IgG4 has a harmful role in the specific diseases. The findings were also published in the leading journal "Frontiers in Immunology" in 2018.

About Inga Koneczny
Inga Koneczny is a project leader at the Institute of Neurology. She studied molecular biology at the University of Vienna, going on to complete a doctoral programme in Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Oxford. After this, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the universities of Yale (until 2014) and Maastricht (until 2016). Even during her doctoral studies she was conducting research into the autoantibodies of myasthenia gravis patients. She continued her research into the disease at Yale and Maastricht universities. On her return, in November 2016 she took up a position as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Neurology, assigned to the working group of Romana Höftberger, with whom she worked on the development of innovative test methods for identifying new anti-neuronal autoantibodies.  She has already obtained prestigious grants (DOC fFORTE from the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Erwin Schrödinger international scholarship from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF)). In 2018, she won a prestigious FWF Hertha Firnberg project grant. She has also authored and co-authored 13 scientific publications.

CORA 2019 website: https://cora.kenes.com/2019#.XI9qJqMrm71

Link to specialist article: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2018.00097/full

Link to award page: https://cora.kenes.com/2019/scientific/cora-2019-awards#.XI-YytFCcnU