Professor Christine S. Falk

Country: Germany

Institution: Hannover Medical School, MHH, Hannover, Germany

Research Areas: Transplant Immunology, Tumor Immunology, NK cells, T cells

Lab Website: www.mh-hannover.de/22614.html

Christine Falk is head of the Institute of Transplant Immunology at MHH and her research focuses on immune regulation in solid organ transplantation, primarily lung, heart and liver transplantation, and with a special interest in ischemia/reperfusion injury. Coming from the cancer filed at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, she sees tumor and transplant immunology as two sides of the same coin – on one hand with the chance, to learn from solid tumors how they protect themselves from immune recognition and rejection. On the other hand, with the chance to learn from transplanted organs what it takes to reject allografts. In both situations, there are common denominators of rejection, i.e. specialized innate and adaptive immune cells and cytokine/chemokine networks, which orchestrate immune responses and may represent biomarker candidates. The group has established an immunomics portfolio for immune monitoring of solid organ transplant recipients comprising flow cytometry panels for immune cells, multiplex analyses, functional assays and expression profiling. The complexity of the immune contexture in transplantation needs to be analyzed by advanced statistical methods like unsupervised cluster, principal component analyses. All projects are performed in close collaboration with clinical colleagues at MHH and abroad – the most effective way to approach complex clinical questions with sophisticated techniques.