Stefan Kaufmann
Director of the Department of Immunology, Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, Berlin; Professor for Microbiology and Immunology at Charité Universitätsmedizin, Humboldt-Universität Berlin, Germany
Breaking the Wall of Unequally Distributed Diseases. What Immunology Can Contribute to One Healthy World.
Is there such a thing as having your fair share when it comes to diseases? We live in a world where twenty percent of its population bears eighty percent of the disease burden – the three major infectious diseases, HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis threaten developed and undeveloped countries unequally.
How can we address and eliminate this imbalance? Working as the director of the internationally renowned Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, immunologist Stefan Kaufmann (1948) locates biomarkers for protective immunity, which promise to be the nuclei for entirely new vaccines. Indeed, his newly developed vaccine against tuberculosis has entered clinical trials. In times where vaccines remain the subject of frequent controversy, combating disease requires new strategies and paradigms for immunology. Kaufmann’s research promises to unravel our conceptions of protective immunity – thereby paving the way for solving of the old paradox: fairness in disease.
