Press Release
Winners Announced for 2022 Boulle-SEI Awards for Immunology Research
16th December 2022
For the second consecutive year, the Spanish Society of Immunology (SEI) and Jean Boulle Group have recognized the work of research, diagnosis and treatment of immune system pathologies through the second Boulle-SEI Awards.
This year the Boulle-SEI Award judging panel, composed of leading international figures in health and immunologyand chaired by Dr. Mihai Netea, has chosen the research projects of Ruslan Medzhitov.
(Uzbekistan) in the Balmis category and Akiko Iwasaki (Japan) in the Zendal category as winners of the Boulle-SEI Awards and they will each receive an endowment of € 50,000.
“Our group is pleased to again support and recognize the scientific excellence of research teams around the world who have stood out for their inspiring work in the rapidly developing field of immunology. We congratulate the winners of the 2022 Boulle- SEI Awards, we thank the judges and once again express our gratitude to the many organizations involved in the administration of the symposium” said Leighton Durham, Executive Director of Trained Therapeutix Discovery and representative of the Jean Boulle Group.
The announcement made by the Spanish Society of Immunology and the University of Alicante is reproduced below:
To treat infectious diseases such as COVID-19, sepsis or tuberculosis, as well as other immune-based pathologies such as organ transplantation, atherosclerosis and cancer
New therapies aimed at the innate immune system present hopeful results at the Second International Symposium on Immunology and Health A-WISH
- These therapies are very effective against very different microorganisms, which opens up a large field of research that is providing important results, related to the effectiveness of a nanotherapy in the prevention of Covid-19
- To present them, world scientific references in innate immunity meet in Alicante on December 15 and 16
- The winners of the Second BOULLE-SEI Award for scientific excellence, endowed with € 100,000, are Ruslan Medzhitov (Uzbekistan) in the Balmis category and Akiko Iwasaki (Japan) in the Zendal category
- The opening ceremony of the symposium will be attended by the President of the Spanish Society of Immunology, Marcos López Hoyos, the President of the University of Alicante, Amparo Navarro and Dr. Cristóbal Belda, director of the Carlos III Health Institute of Madrid
Alicante, 15 December 2022. Innate or natural immunity is the defence system with which we are born and is the body’s first line of defence of our immune response. This field has aroused great interest in recent years, especially after the global pandemic by COVID-19. During 15 and 16th December members of the global scientific research community who are engaged in the study of innate immunity are gathering in the city of Alicante to present advances, many of them for the first time.
The event is the second edition of the International Symposium on Immunology and Health (A-WISH) and has been organized by the Spanish Society of Immunology (SEI) and the University of Alicante (UA). With the collaboration of the Jean Boulle Group, co-founder of the Boulle-SEI research awards; the International Consortium on Trained Immunity (INTRIM), which aims to investigate the mechanisms of adaptation of the innate immune system; and the INsTRuCT consortium, a PhD student training network under the European Union’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie programme.
“The appointment is part of the agreement signed between the SEI and the UA a year ago that turned the Alicante teaching institution into the winter headquarters of the scientific society,” said Amparo Navarro, President of the University of Alicante.
During the symposium, scientists and pharmaceutical laboratories from around the world will present the results of the latest research carried out in the field of Innate Immunology, through innovative diagnostic and therapeutic approaches to treat infectious diseases such as COVID-19, sepsis or tuberculosis, as well as other immune-based pathologies such as organ transplantation, atherosclerosis and cancer.
“Recent studies have shown that targeted therapies against the innate immune system are very effective against very different microorganisms. This is a large research area which is making important findings, and many of which will be presented forthe first time in this symposium”, explained Dr. Jordi Cano, Ochando, President of the Alicante – Winter Immunology Symposium in Health (A-WISH) and director of Immunology Group at the Carlos III Health Institute.
For example, on Friday, December 16, Dr. Willem Mulder will present the results for the first time in the Auditorium of the Diputación de Alicante (ADDA). In particular, non-human primates (monkeys) with cardiovascular disease were exposed to SARS-CoV-2 and treated with nano-immuno therapy to prevent organ inflammation. The results demonstrate the efficacy of a nanotherapy against the innate immune system to prevent COVID-19 disease. These results will be sent shortly to the journal Nature.
“Through close collaboration between industrial and academic partners, INsTRuCT seeks innovative solutions to the most significant questions in MRC-based therapy in order to deliver new scientific understanding, new technologies and new, commercially viable treatments” explained Dr. James Hutchinson, coordinator of the innovative training network InsTRuCT and researcher at the Regensburg University Hospital in Germany.
Among the attendees are international speakers such as Mihai Netea (Netherlands), Triantafyllos Chavakis (Greece), Shabaana Khader (USA), Musa Mhlanga (South Africa), Silvia Gregori (Italy), Luke O’Neill (Ireland), Dietmar Zaiss (Germany) Christine Stabell-Benn (Denmark), Maziar Divangahi (Canada), Florent Ginhoux (France), Ruslan Medzhitov (Uzbekistan) and Akiko Iwasaki (Japan). Among them, two of the winners of the BOULLE-SEI Award for scientific excellence.
Second Boulle-SEI Awards
During the symposium and for the second consecutive year, the Spanish Society of Immunology (SEI) and Jean Boulle Group will recognize the work of research, diagnosis and treatment of immune system pathologies through the second Boulle-SEI Awards.
This year the Boulle-SEI Award judging panel, composed of leading international figures in health and immunologyand chaired by Dr. Mihai Netea, has chosen the research projects of Ruslan Medzhitov
(Uzbekistan) in the Balmis category and Akiko Iwasaki (Japan) in the Zendal category as winners of the Boulle-SEI Awards and they will each receive an endowment of € 50,000.
“Our group is pleased to again support and recognize the scientific excellence of research teams around the world who have stood out for their inspiring work in the rapidly developing field of immunology. We congratulate the winners of the 2022 Boulle- SEI Awards, we thank the judges and once again express our gratitude to the many organizations involved in the administration of the symposium” said Leighton Durham, Executive Director of Trained Therapeutix Discovery and representative of the Jean Boulle Group.
The Boulle-SEI Awards were inspired by the Royal Philanthropic Vaccine Expedition led by the Alicante surgeon Francisco Javier de Balmis between 1803 and 1806, and the invaluable role of the scientist Isabel Zendal, without whom the expedition would not have been completed.
“The Boulle-SEI Awards aim to recognize and value the team behind the work, rather than the individual, as well as to make visible the talent of women scientists and their leadership in research groups,” explained Dr. Marcos López Hoyos, President of the Spanish Society of Immunology.
- Ruslan Medzhitov[1],[2],[3] is Sterling Professor of Immunobiology at Yale School of Medicine and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. He obtained his PhD from Moscow State University in 1993. He became an assistant professor in 1999 at Yale University School of Medicine in the Department of Immunobiology. He is currently a Sterling Professor of Immunobiology at Yale University School of Medicine and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. When he was a graduate student, Dr. Ruslan Medzhitov read a theory written by Dr. Charles Janeway that foresaw the existence of a set of receptors that would directly detect pathogens and signal to T- and B-cells to generate an immune response (adaptive immunity). Medzhitov was determined to find such receptors and in 1997 he cloned a human toll like receptor for the first time. A year later, Medzhitov demonstrated that signaling by the human Toll receptor employs an adaptor protein, MyD88. His research interests include biology of inflammation, mechanisms of disease, innate immunity, infection biology, allergy, cell signaling and gene regulation. Dr. Medzhitov is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Medicine, and European Molecular Biology Organization, a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and he is a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology.
- Akiko Iwasaki[4],[5] is Sterling Professor of Immunobiology at Yale School of Medicine and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in Canada and her postdoctoral training from the National Institutes of Health. Her research focuses on the mechanisms of immune defence against viruses at the mucosal surfaces, and the development of mucosal vaccine strategies. She is the co-Lead Investigator of the Yale COVID-19 Recovery Study, which aims to determine the changes in the immune response of people with long COVID after vaccination. Iwasaki also leads multiple other studies to interrogate the pathobiology of long COVID, both in patients, and through developing animal models of long COVID. Dr. Iwasaki was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2018, to the National Academy of Medicine in 2019, to the European Molecular Biology Organization in 2021, and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021.
The Boulle-SEI Awards ceremony will coincide with the closing ceremony of the symposium: on Friday, December 16, at 7:00 p.m. in the Auditorium of the Diputación de Alicante.
For more information and interview management:
PRESS Spanish Society of Immunology
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663 720 802
Jean Boulle Group
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+352 222 512
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About the Spanish Society of Immunology
The Spanish Society of Immunology is a non-profit medical society that represents the interests of immunology in Spain in the hospital, teaching and research field. Its main purpose is to promote the development and advancement of immunology as a science of life and health, facilitate the contact of its associates with each other and with other scientists or related entities, contribute to the training and professional improvement of the specialty and defend scientific interests of its associates. www.inmunologia.org
About the University of Alicante
The University of Alicante is a public institution of higher education committed to quality training, research, dissemination and knowledge transfer. It is one of the few Spanish universities that appear among the top 600 positions in the prestigious Shanghai Ranking. It currently offers 52 undergraduate degrees, 5 of them double degrees, 6 simultaneous study programs and 12 international double degree programs with universities in the United States, Germany and Brazil. It is a face-to-face, open, supportive, inclusive, responsible and transparent university that relies on technological transformation for the promotion of its strategic objectives www.ua.es
About the Jean Boulle Group
The Jean Boulle Group’s interests span a wide range of areas; but they focus mainly on natural resources, medical technology, therapy and philanthropy. Since its founding by Jean Raymond Boulle, the Group has completed transactions with a combined value of more than US$5 billion.
Boulle Therapeutics, part of the Group, invests in innovative techniques for the treatment of harmful diseases. Boulle Therapeutics identifies, invests in and supports the development of early-stage innovations that have the potential to save lives and improve the quality of life for a large number of people over many generations. One such Boulle Therapeutics company is Trained Therapeutix Discovery, Inc. (TTxD) https://www.ttxdiscovery.com/
Traditionally, it has been assumed that immunological memory is located exclusively in our adaptive immune system. The pioneering work of TTxD’s scientific founders, Mihai Netea and Leo Joosten, has revealed that the innate immune system also has adaptive characteristics. This de facto innate immune memory is called “trained immunity.” The other scientific founders are: Jordi C. Ochando, Ph.D Professor at the Icahn Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York; Willem Mulder Ph.D. Professor of Precision Medicine at Eindhoven University of Technology; and Zahi Fayad, Ph.D. Lucy G Moses Professor of Bioengineeringand Medical Genes. https://www.jeanboullegroup.com/
[1] https://medicine.yale.edu/news/yale-medicine-magazine/article/the-history-behind-the-discovery-of-toll-like-receptors/
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9237759/
[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9734363/
[4] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1818903115