The International Cytokine & Interferon Society (ICIS) is a non-profit organization composed of researchers of cytokines, interferons and chemokine cell biology, molecular biology, biochemistry, and the use of biological response modifiers clinically. [1] As the premier organization in the field of cytokine biology, it has more than 950 member scientists and holds annual conferences around the world.
The ICIS has an elected Council that oversees operations. Sarah Gaffen (University of Pittsburgh) is the current President, Curt Horvath (Northwestern University) is President-Elect, Chris Hunter (University of Pennsylvania) is Past-President.
Originally founded in 1988 as "The International Cytokine Society" (ICS), after having co-hosted annual meetings with the International Society for Interferon and Cytokine Research (ISICR), the two organizations merged to become the International Cytokine and Interferon Society (ICIS) in 2013. [1]
ICIS holds annual conferences around the world, usually in October or November. The 2024 conference was held jointly with the Korean Association of Immunology at the COEX Convention & Exhibition Center Seoul, Korea. The conference featured keynote speakers Professors Judi Allen (University of Manchester) and Nobel Laureate Drew Weissman (University of Pennsylvania). The 2025 ICIS meeting will be held Nov 2-5 in Seattle Washington .
Each year the society selects recipients of multiple awards at various career stages.
Mid-Senior career awards: ICIS/Pfizer Award for Excellence in Cytokine and Interferon Research (formerly known as the Seymour and Vivian Milstein Award), the ICIS/BioLegend William E. Paul Award, the ICIS/Luminex Jack Kettman Award, the ICIS Mentorship Award, the ICIS Honorary Lifetime Membership Award, and the ICIS/Howard A. Young Distinguished Service Award.
Young Investigator awards: ICIS/ Regeneron Pharmaceuticals New investigator awards, ICIS/Christina Fleischmann Award, ICIS/ Pfizer Amanda Proudfoot Tribute Award for Advances in Chemokine Biology, and the Joan and Sidney Pestka Graduate and Post-Graduate awards.
Travel Awards: Many travel awards are given to top-ranked abstracts for attendance at the annual meeting. The ICIS Joan Oefner travel award was created in 2024.
The ICIS has no official journal. There are informal connections to the Journal of Cytokine and Interferon Research, published by Mary Ann Liebert, and Cytokine, a peer-reviewed scientific journal covering all aspects of cytokine biology is published by Elsevier.
The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) was founded in order to "promote excellence in research and teaching of American foreign relations history and to facilitate professional collaboration among scholars and students in this field around the world." It hosts an annual conference, and publishes the quarterly Diplomatic History. It also publishes a triennial newsletter, Passport. SHAFR has increasingly fostered connections with international historians and organizations.
Jan T. Vilček is a Slovak-American biomedical scientist, educator, inventor and philanthropist. He is a professor in the department of microbiology at the New York University School of Medicine, and chairman and CEO of The Vilcek Foundation. Vilček received his M.D. degree from Comenius University Medical School in Bratislava in 1957; and his Ph.D. in Virology from the Institute of Virology, Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, in 1962.
Cytokine receptors are receptors that bind to cytokines.
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Anne O'Garra FRS FMedSci is a British immunologist who has made important discoveries on the mechanism of action of Interleukin 10.
Carlos Martínez Alonso, was born in Villasimpliz, in the province of León, on January 9, 1950. In 1974 he obtained a chemistry degree from the Universidad Complutense of Madrid. Four years later, in 1978, he obtained a Ph.D. in immunology by the same university. He was appointed President of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) from 2004 to 2008, and Secretary of State for Research in the Ministry of Science and Innovation from early 2008 to December 2009.
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Sidney Pestka was an American biochemist and geneticist. A recipient of the National Medal of Technology, he is sometimes referred to as the "father of interferon" for his groundbreaking work developing the interferons as treatments for major diseases such as hepatitis, multiple sclerosis, and cancer. Pestka was part of the team working on research involving the genetic code, protein synthesis and ribosome function that led to the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine received by Marshall Warren Nirenberg.
Andrew D. Luster is the Persis, Cyrus and Marlow B. Harrison Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and the Chief of the Division of Rheumatology, Allergy and Immunology at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is Director of its Research Center for Immunology and Inflammatory Diseases, and a member of the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center's Cancer Immunology program.
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Seymour Milstein was an American real estate developer and philanthropist.
Kathryn C. Zoon is a U.S.-based immunologist, elected to the U.S. Institute of Medicine in 2002 for her research on human interferons. She is the former scientific director of the Division of Intramural Research at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. From 1992 to 2002, Zoon was director of the FDA Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER).
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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.
Michael Katze is an American microbiologist. For over 35 years, he has researched host-virus interactions, incorporating systems biology approaches into infectious disease research. He was an international leader in the application of genome sequencing, animal models, and systems biology approaches to virology and immunology. Katze was formerly Professor of Microbiology at the University of Washington (UW), and Associate Director for Molecular Sciences and a Core Staff Scientist at the Washington National Primate Research Center. In August 2017, Katze was fired from the University of Washington for sexually harassing his employees and misusing research funds.
Alberto Mantovani is an Italian physician and immunologist. He is Scientific Director of Istituto Clinico Humanitas, President and Founder of the Fondazione Humanitas per la Ricerca, and Professor of Pathology at the State University of Milan. He is known for his works in the roles of the immune system in the development of cancer. His research on tumor-associated macrophages established inflammation as one of the causes of cancer. He was the first to identify monocyte chemotactic protein - 1 / CCL2 in 1983, and PTX3 in 1997. His works revealed the existence of decoy receptors in cell-signalling. He has been the most cited scientist in Italy, and one of the ten most cited immunologists worldwide.
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