Prof Georg Holländer

Prof Georg Holländer is the Director of the BRCCH and an expert in molecular developmental immunology. He holds professorships at the University of Basel, ETH Zurich and the University of Oxford, UK. Together with Vice Director Sai Reddy, Prof Holländer is the Centre’s academic leader and is responsible for its strategic orientation and initiatives.

Prof Holländer is Professor of Paediatric Immunology in the Department of Biomedicine at the University of Basel, Professor of Developmental Immunology at ETH Zurich and the Hoffmann and Action Medical Research Professor of Developmental Medicine and Head of the Department of Paediatrics at the University of Oxford, UK. He trained in both paediatrics and experimental immunology in Switzerland and the USA and completed his medical studies at the University of Basel. He then did his postdoctoral work and held a position at Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA, before rejoining the University of Basel as a faculty member and then subsequently the University of Oxford. His research interest is the development and function of the immune system in health and disease. His particular scientific focus concerns the immunobiology of the thymus, which is the body’s primary lymphoid organ for the development and selection of T lymphocytes, a type of cell critical to the functioning of the adaptive immune system response. In order to study the physiology of thymus development and to further characterize the pathologies that evolve as a consequence of damage to the thymus, Prof Holländer’s research laboratory has developed mouse models for studying thymus development and function.

Prof Sai Reddy

Prof Sai Reddy is Vice Director of the BRCCH and an expert in systems and synthetic immunology. He holds a professorship at ETH Zurich and is the co-founder of the biotechnology spin-off company deepCDR Biologics. Together with Director Georg Holländer, Prof Reddy is the Centre’s academic leader and is responsible for its strategic orientation and initiatives.

Prof Reddy is an associate professor at ETH Zurich in the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering (D-BSSE). His research is focused on the emerging field of systems and synthetic immunology, with an aim towards developing technologies relevant to immunotherapy and biotechnology. Systems immunology uses quantitative multiscale measurements and computational biology in order to describe and understand the complexity of the immune system. Prof Reddy has developed a number of methods in systems immunology to improve our understanding of adaptive immunity, with a particular focus on immune repertoire sequencing. Synthetic immunology uses methods in molecular and cellular engineering to control immune cell function and behaviour. Prof Reddy’s group has established methods of reprogramming immune cells for applications in protein engineering and cellular immunotherapy, with an emphasis on immunogenomic engineering. In addition to the academic community, Prof Reddy has done work to support the biotechnology industry, including several sponsored research projects with local and international companies, such as Roche (CH), Novartis (CH) and UCB-Celltech (UK). Recently, he founded a company (deepCDR Biologics) based on technologies developed in his research group on antibody drug discovery and engineering.