Antonio Lanzavecchia, MD

Antonio Lanzavecchia is renowned for his work on antigen presentation processes, T lymphocyte activation, immunological memory, and studies on human monoclonal antibodies. He earned his medical degree from the University of Pavia, where he specialized in pediatrics and infectious diseases Since 1983, he has been working in Switzerland, initially as a member of the Basel Institute for Immunology and, since 2000, as the founder and director of the Institute for Research in Biomedicine in Bellinzona. Lanzavecchia has been a professor of Immunology at the University of Genoa, the University of Siena, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. He is a member of EMBO, the Royal College of Physicians, and an honorary member of the American Society of Immunology, the Swiss Society for Immunology, and the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences. He has received several prestigious awards, including the EMBO Gold Medal, the Cloëtta Prize, the Robert Koch Prize, the Sanofi-Institut Pasteur Prize, and the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine. Lanzavecchia is the scientific founder of Humabs Biomed, now a subsidiary of Vir Biotechnology, and is currently a senior researcher at Vir Biotechnology. His academic research activities continue at INGM.