What is inflammation?

Inflammation is a natural process.

Inflammation is there to protect the body against viruses and bacteria, against burns

for instance, against stress.

However, inflammation has to readily stop.

If it doesn't stop, there is a serious problem because the continuous immune activation is

very dangerous for humans.

The treatment of autoimmune disease today is very challenging because patients have

to take medication lifelong to suppress the immune system.

In 2021, my dear colleague Andreas Mackensen and me infused therapeutic cells into a patient

with a severe autoimmune disease.

We call systemic lupus erythematosus, which is so-called the red wolf.

After infusion of these therapeutic cells, the patient substantially improved and two

and a half years after the single infusion of therapeutic cells, the patient is still

in complete remission and doesn't take any immunosuppressive drug.

We think that this is a very nice example that you can go new ways to treat autoimmune

disease in different disciplines.

Chronic or persistent disease causes an imbalance in tissue processes, resulting in chronic

inflammation and organ damage.

Our research aims to better understand these processes and find a way to restore tissue

balance into its osmosis, which is essential for developing sustainable therapeutic approaches.

In summary, our goal is to use cells as sensors for diagnostic and effectors for therapeutic

approaches to identify and correct imbalance in tissue and immune cells network, ultimately

aiming to cure chronic disease.

Medical problems we are interested in Erlangen include autoimmune diseases such as autoimmune

colitis, cancer such as colon cancer, and inflammatory processes such as arthritis or

some heart-related diseases.

What I really like about Erlangen and its environment is the interdisciplinary approaches people

take here, openness of medics towards fundamental research.

So physicians here, they collaborate with scientists from physics, biology, chemistry

to understand what happens during a disease, what goes wrong, and what can we do in the

future to prevent this or to treat it, to heal it.

An example is the foundation of the new Max Planck-Zentrum für Physik in Medizin at the

heart of the medical campus in Erlangen, which is run by physicists who jointly with medics

work on basic questions and fundamental questions related to health and disease.