Lecture Title: Life and Death of Alveolar Macrophages
Manfred Kopf completed his PhD in the lab of the Nobel laureate Georges Köhler at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology, Freiburg, Germany by 1994, from where he moved as a group leader to the legendary Basel Institute of Immunology until its closure in 2001. Moving on from there, he became full professor of Molecular Biomedicine at the Swiss Federal Institute for Technology (ETH) Zürich. His lab has been investigating the underlying molecular and cellular mechanisms in inflammatory diseases and various acute and chronic infectious diseases with a focus on the role of T cells, dendritic cells, and macrophages. Moreover, there is a long-standing interest in the role of cytokines in health and disease. Over the past 30 years, he provided seminal contributions to the characterization of the functions of a variety of cytokines including IL-1, IL-4, IL-5, IL-6, IL-21, IL-36, IFN-g, and GM-CSF in vivo. He is a co-founder of an ETH spin-off company, which was acquired by Repertoire Immune Medicine.