Professor Dr Andreas Radbruch

Andreas Radbruch has been Scientific Director of the Deutsches Rheuma-Forschungszentrum Berlin (DRFZ) since 1996. He works on the molecular basis of immunological memory and its role in immunopathology.
Initially he showed that antibody class switching in B Lymphocytes is based on targeted recombination affecting the expressed and the silenced igh-genes. He showed that targeting of switch recombination to distinct switch regions requires their transcription,regulated by cytokines, and processing of the transcripts. He originally defined long-lived plasma cells, their role in humoral memory and in autoimmune disease and developed a novel concept for plasma cell homeostasis. He developed technologies for intracellular cytokine staining and the isolation of living cells according to cytokine secretion and used them to define the molecular imprinting of functional memory in T cells.
His concept of a pathogenic immunological memory driving autoimmune inflammation has initiated the therapy of autoimmune diseases by immunoablation, showing that the immune system can be reset to tolerance. He is an expert on cytometry and cell sorting. He is a coinventor of magnetic cell-sorting (MACS technology).