Director of the Institute

Antonio Lanzavecchia earned a degree in Medicine at the University of Pavia where he specialized in Paediatrics and in Infectious Diseases. From 1983 to 1999 he was a member of the Basel Institute for Immunology and since 1999 he is the founding director of the IRB in Bellinzona. He has been Professor of Immunology at the University of Genoa and at the University of Siena. Awarded the EMBO medal in 1988 and the Cloëtta prize in 1999. In 2009, Prof. Lanzavecchia was named full professor of Immunology at the ETH in Zurich.

Dr. Lanzavecchia has published more than 200 papers. His research has covered several aspects of human immunology: antigen processing and presentation, dendritic cell biology, lymphocyte activation and traffic, T and B cell memory. Recently he developed a method for the efficient isolation of human monoclonal antibodies from memory B cells, which has been successfully applied to infectious diseases such as SARSCoV, H5N1, HCMV, Dengue, Malaria and HIV-1.

Research Group: Immune Regulation