Jana Pachlopnik Schmid, Prof. Dr.
Principal Investigator
About
Jana is a professor and chair for pediatric immunology at the University of Zurich, director of the division of immunology and head of the diagnostic laboratory for immunology of the University Children's Hospital Zurich.
Jana is trained in medicine and completed her PhD at the University of Berne. She is specialized in Pediatrics, in Allergology and Clinical Immunology (Swiss board certificates) and in Pediatric Rheumatology (French diploma). She pursued a postdoctoral fellowship at INSERM, Necker Hospital, Paris France, in the laboratory of Professor Alain Fischer under the supervision of Dr. Geneviève de Saint Basile, where she performed early experimental proof-of-concept studies on the first targeted treatment of a rare immune dysregulatory disease, Haemophagocytic Lymphohistiocytosis (HLH), which has been approved for the treatment of HLH by FDA. Jana participated in the discovery and characterization of numerous monogenic immunodeficiencies such as FILS-syndrome, MST1-deficiency, TTC7A-deficiency and CD48-haploinsufficiency.
The main focus of her research is to unravel immune regulatory mechanisms controlling lymphocyte homeostasis harnessing research on monogenic immunodeficiency diseases with the aim to make use of the knowledge to develop targeted treatment strategies.