Precision Medicine in Transplanation-Immune monitoring for the discrimination of GVHD, rejection and CMV infection

Christine Falk graduated in Biology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich and performed her PhD thesis at the Institute for Immunology at LMU Munich (director G. Riethmüller) in the laboratory of D.J. Schendel on autoimmunity and the regulation of NK-like T cells and NK cells. As a postdoctoral fellow at the new Institute of Molecular Immunology (director D.J. Schendel) at the Helmholtz Center for Environment and Health (GMGU), she studied recognition of virus-infected cells and tumor cells by T and NK cells. As senior postdoctoral fellow and head of the research group “Immune Monitoring” at the German Cancer Research Center DKFZ in Heidelberg from 2006 until 2010, she was working on the microenviroment of solid tumors and its impact on tumor recognition by T and NK cells. In her current position since 2010, she is head of the Institute of Transplant Immunology, IFB-Tx, at Hannover Medical School MHH where she has established an immune monitoring laboratory investigating adaptive and innate immune responses in the context of stem cell as well as solid organ transplantation, in particular lung, heart, liver and kidney transplantation. The addition of transplant immunology to her former field of tumor immunology is reflected by focusing on common immunological mechanisms for rejection of both tumors and allografts that may open new perspectives for immunological interventions to achieve tumor rejection on one hand and on the other hand, immunological tolerance, the ultimate goal of solid organ transplantation