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Profile
| Research fields | Immunology,Bioinformatics and Theoretical Biology |
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| Keywords | Memory Driven Computing, BigData-Analysen / Transk, Genomics, T cell activation, cancer, gene expression profiling |
| Honours and awards | 2001: Sofja-Kovalevskaja Preis |
Current contact address
| Country | Germany |
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| City | Bonn |
| Institution | Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn |
| Institute | Life and Medical Sciences Center (LIMES) |
| Homepage | https://www.limes-institut-bonn.de/en/research/research-departments/unit-2/schultze-lab/people/lab-head/ |
Host during sponsorship
| Prof. Dr. Volker Diehl | Klinik I für Innere Medizin, Universität zu Köln, Köln |
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| Start of initial sponsorship | 01/11/2001 |
Programme(s)
| 2001 | Sofja Kovalevskaja Award Programme |
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Nominator's project description
| Dr. Schultze is clearly one of the leading young scientist in his field of research focusing on the immunology and immunotherapy of cancer with a particular focus on hematologic malignancies. He studied medicine at the University of Tuebingen where he already started his work in immunology. Under the directions of Professor Berg he performed his doctoral thesis about the influence of certain lectins on the immune response of cancer patients. Dr. Schultze joined the laboratory of Professor Lee Nadler at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School in 1993. He primarily focused on the role of the CD40-CD40L interactions and its potential to develop a novel cancer immunotherapy concept for patients with tumors derived from malignant B cells, an important cell of the immune system. Dr. Schultze is one of the rare individuals who has covered this long distance and has demonstrated that novel knowledge can be translated into clinical experiments. Based on the interaction between CD40 on the tumor cell and a CD40L signal, he has demonstrated that malignant B cells can be turned into efficient antigen presenting cells thereby stimulating the patient¿s immune system and he has recently translated this concept into a vaccine approach for patients with B cell malignancies. More recently he was one of the founding members of a team of researchers that have developed the concept of so-called universal tumor antigens. Dr. Schultze and his colleagues have demonstrated that tumor antigens exist that are expressed in the majority of all human cancer and that these targets might be used for vaccines that could be applied to the great majority of all patients with cancer. Dr. Schultze will continue this work also in Cologne. Despite these promising results Dr. Schultze and his team have established over the last years, he has always been worried by the dysfunctional immune system in cancer patients. For years he studied the functional defects in patients with lymphoma without being able to pin point the exact mechanisms. Similar results have been reported for most other cancers such as colon cancer or breast cancer. It seemed that the classical hypothesis driven approach would not lead to an answer in this critical area of cancer research. There is no doubt that any kind of active immunotherapy will only be successful if immune defects can be overcome. To address this important question Dr. Schultze has now proposed to merge two fields of research, namely the functional and immunological characterization of T cells in cancer patient with the new molecular approach of gene expression profiling. This is the central theme of his research supported by the Sofja-Kovalevskaja award. He proposes to define gene clusters or marker genes that will lead to the signalling pathways involved in T cell inhibition in cancer patients. Once identified, it will be possible to specifically determine therapeutic counterattacks. |
Publications (partial selection)
| 2007 | Chemnitz JM, Eggle D, Driesen J, Classen S, Riley JL, Debey-Pascher S, Beyer M, Popov A, Zander Z, Schultze JL: RNA-fingerprints provide direct evidence for the inhibitory role of TGFβ on CD4+ T cells in Hodgkin¿s lymphoma. In: Blood, 2007, 3226-3233 |
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