Danny Altmann

Last updated

Danny Altmann is a British immunologist, and Professor of Immunology at Imperial College London. [1] [2]

Altmann earned a bachelor's degree from the University of London in 1980, and a PhD from the University of Bristol in 1983 on T cell immunity to herpesviruses. [3]

Altmann is the son of John Altmann, [4] who arrived as a refugee from the Holocaust on the Kindertransport, [5] [6] and Marlene Altmann, who arrived after liberation from Auschwitz. Through her, he is in turn the great-grandson of German philanthropist Adolf Sternheim  [ de ]. [7]

Altmann runs a research lab at Imperial College's Hammersmith Hospital site, "focusing on HLA genes, T cells and NK cells in autoimmunity, cancer and infectious disease." [2] He has been based there since 1994. [8] Between 2011 and 2013 he was also Head of Pathogens, Immunity and Population Health at the Wellcome Trust. He now runs a suite of projects focussed on understanding the immunology of Long Covid, [9] which has included co-authoring The Long Covid Handbook. [10]

He is editor-in-chief of Oxford Open Immunology. [11] For 20 years, Altmann was editor of British Society for Immunology (BSI) journals, including 14-years as editor-in-chief at Immunology , and is an associate editor at Vaccine and Frontiers in Immunology. [8] Altmann is a trustee of the Medical Research Foundation. [2] He has sat on the Strategy Board of the African Research Excellence Fund since its inception [12]

During the COVID-19 pandemic, he has served in a number of policy advisory roles. [13] [14] He has been a member of Independent SAGE since December 2021. [15] He was the guest on the BBC Radio 4 programme The Life Scientific in February 2023. [16]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vaccine</span> Pathogen-derived preparation that provides acquired immunity to an infectious disease

A vaccine is a biological preparation that provides active acquired immunity to a particular infectious or malignant disease. The safety and effectiveness of vaccines has been widely studied and verified. A vaccine typically contains an agent that resembles a disease-causing microorganism and is often made from weakened or killed forms of the microbe, its toxins, or one of its surface proteins. The agent stimulates the body's immune system to recognize the agent as a threat, destroy it, and recognize further and destroy any of the microorganisms associated with that agent that it may encounter in the future.

Immunotherapy or biological therapy is the treatment of disease by activating or suppressing the immune system. Immunotherapies designed to elicit or amplify an immune response are classified as activation immunotherapies, while immunotherapies that reduce or suppress are classified as suppression immunotherapies. Immunotherapy is under preliminary research for its potential to treat various forms of cancer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ruth Arnon</span> Israeli biochemist

Ruth Arnon is an Israeli biochemist and codeveloper of the multiple sclerosis drug Copaxone. She is currently the Paul Ehrlich Professor of Immunology at the Weizmann Institute of Science, where she is researching anti-cancer and influenza vaccinations.

In immunology, an adjuvant is a substance that increases or modulates the immune response to a vaccine. The word "adjuvant" comes from the Latin word adiuvare, meaning to help or aid. "An immunologic adjuvant is defined as any substance that acts to accelerate, prolong, or enhance antigen-specific immune responses when used in combination with specific vaccine antigens."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Angus Dalgleish</span> British oncologist

Angus George Dalgleish FRCP FRCPath FMedSci is a professor of oncology at St George's, University of London, best known for his contributions to HIV/AIDS research. Dalgleish stood in 2015 for Parliament as a UKIP candidate.

A subunit vaccine is a vaccine that contains purified parts of the pathogen that are antigenic, or necessary to elicit a protective immune response. Subunit vaccine can be made from dissembled viral particles in cell culture or recombinant DNA expression, in which case it is a recombinant subunit vaccine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stefan H. E. Kaufmann</span>

Stefan Hugo Ernst Kaufmann is a German immunologist and microbiologist and is one of the highly cited immunologists worldwide for the decade 1990 to 2000. He is amongst the 0.01% most cited scientists of ca. 7 million scientists in 22 major scientific fields globally.

Peter John Morland Openshaw, is a British clinician and scientist specialising in lung immunology, particularly defence against viral infections. He trained in lung diseases and undertook a PhD in immunology before establishing a laboratory at St Mary's Hospital Medical School. He created the academic department of Respiratory Medicine and the Centre for Respiratory Infection at Imperial College and was elected President of the British Society for Immunology in 2014.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Akiko Iwasaki</span> Immunobiologist

Akiko Iwasaki is a Sterling Professor of Immunobiology and Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at Yale University. She is also a principal investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Her research interests include innate immunity, autophagy, inflammasomes, sexually transmitted infections, herpes simplex virus, human papillomavirus, respiratory virus infections, influenza infection, T cell immunity, commensal bacteria, COVID-19 and Long COVID.

Mary Katharine Levinge Collins, Lady Hunt is a British Professor of virology and the director of the Queen Mary University of London Blizard Institute. She served as Provost at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan. Formerly, Collins taught in the Division of Infection and Immunity at University College London, and was the head of the Division of Advanced Therapies at the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control, and the Director of the Medical Research Council Centre for Medical Molecular Virology. Her research group studies the use of viruses as vectors for introducing new genes into cells, which can be useful for experimental cell biology, for clinical applications such as gene therapy, and as cancer vaccines.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arturo Casadevall</span> Cuban-American scientist

Arturo Casadevall is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Molecular Microbiology & Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and the Alfred and Jill Sommer Professor and Chair of the W. Harry Feinstone Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He is an internationally recognized expert in infectious disease research, with a focus on fungal and bacterial pathogenesis and basic immunology of antibody structure-function. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.

Daniel Michael Davis is Head of Life Sciences and Professor of Immunology at Imperial College London. Davis was previously Professor of Immunology at the University of Manchester. He is the author of The Secret Body, The Beautiful Cure and The Compatibility Gene. His research, using microscopy to study immune cell biology has helped understand how immune cells interact with each other. He co-discovered the immunological synapse and membrane nanotubes.

Dipyaman Ganguly is an Indian physician-scientist immunologist and cell biologist, currently a Principal Scientist and Swarnajayanthi Fellow at the CSIR-Indian Institute of Chemical Biology (IICB). He heads the Dendritic Cell Laboratory of IICB, popularly known as the Ganguly Lab, where he hosts several researchers involved in research on regulation of innate Immunity and pathogenesis of inflammatory disorders. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards for his contributions to Medical Sciences in 2022.

Shane Patrick Crotty is a professor of immunology in the Center for Infectious Disease and Vaccine Research at La Jolla Institute for Immunology.

Dan Hung Barouch is an American physician, immunologist, and virologist. He is known for his work on the pathogenesis and immunology of viral infections and the development of vaccine strategies for global infectious diseases.

Rosemary Jane Boyton is a British immunologist who is Head of Lung Immunology and Adult Infectious Disease at Imperial College London. She works on the molecular immunology of infectious, allergic and autoimmune inflammation. She holds an honorary consultant position at the Royal Brompton Hospital, where she specialises in lung infection.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine</span>

The MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine at the University of Oxford is a research institute located at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. Founded in 1989 by Sir David Weatherall, the institute focuses on furthering our understanding of clinical medicine at a molecular level. It was one of the first institutes of its kind in the world to be dedicated to research in this area.

Michael Joseph Mina is an American epidemiologist, immunologist and physician. He was formerly an assistant professor of Epidemiology & Immunology and Infectious Diseases at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, assistant Professor of Pathology at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and currently Chief Medical Officer at eMed.

Dennis L. Kasper is an American microbiologist and immunologist, and the William Ellery Channing Professor of Medicine and Professor of Immunology at Harvard Medical School. He leads the Kasper Laboratory within the Blavatnik Institute in the Department of Immunology at Harvard Medical School. He was also executive dean for academic programs at Harvard Medical School and director of the Channing Laboratory Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital.

Deborah Kay Dunn-Walters is a British immunologist who is Professor of Immunology at the University of Surrey. Her research considers B-cell development in healthy ageing and in disease, particularly from the viewpoint of antibody repertoires. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dunn-Walters focussed on mapping responses to SARS-CoV-2 infection and the development of single cell analyses of the immunological responses to a COVID-19 vaccine. She was a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, and provided the government with scientific advice during the pandemic.

References

  1. correspondent, Nicola Davis Science (December 30, 2020). "How well does the Oxford vaccine work? What we know so far". The Guardian via www.theguardian.com.
  2. 1 2 3 "Prof. Danny Altmann". Bactivax. 19 November 2019.
  3. "Daniel Altmann (0000-0002-2436-6192)". orcid.org.
  4. "John Altmann" via PressReader.
  5. Guardian Staff (October 15, 2016). "Family life: Kindertransport boys in London in 1939, There's a Kind of Hush, and Raspberry Splodge". The Guardian.
  6. "Kindertransport". January 17, 2021 via Wikipedia.
  7. "Adolf Sternheim - ein Menschenfreund (in German)" (PDF). 2009. Archived from the original (PDF) on 20 October 2013.
  8. 1 2 "Research - Professor Danny Altmann". www.imperial.ac.uk.
  9. "WILCO Long Covid study". Imperial College London. Retrieved 2023-03-08.
  10. Altmann, Gez Medinger,Danny (20 October 2022). The Long Covid Handbook.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  11. https://academic.oup.com/ooim.{{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  12. "Strategy Board". Africa Research Excellence Fund.
  13. "What do we know about the SARSCoV2 virus and its transmission". www.parliament.uk.
  14. "The Science and Technology Committee: News Updates". The Association for Science and Discovery Centres.
  15. "Who are we? | Independent SAGE" . Retrieved 2023-03-08.
  16. "How T cells fight disease" . Retrieved 14 March 2023.