The FOCIS Centers of Excellence (FCE) is a network of multidisciplinary academic medical centers that encompass three or more areas of research relevant to clinical immunology and have met criteria to be designated by FOCIS as FCEs.
Please join us in welcoming the following three centers to the FCE network.
1. Singapore: Translational Immunology Institute (TII) is a joint initiative between Duke-NUS and SingHealth, under the leadership of Prof. Salvatore Albani, MD, PhD. The vision of the TII FCE is to advance the knowledge of Human Immunology and exploit such knowledge to address unmet medical needs. TII’s scientific approach relates to Systems Immunology in a multidimensional translational fashion. The knowledge achieved is exploited to define new targets for immunotherapy, or to stratify patients’ subsets more prone to responding to existing therapies. TII’s architecture is organized in two interlaced dimensions: a technology platform and a clinical translational platform.
2. Rouen, France: Pan’ther (Pathophysiology, Autoimmunity and biotherapy) at the University of Normandy, UNIROUEN, in Rouen is led by Prof. Olivier Boyer, MD, PhD. The Pan’ther FCE’s goal is to investigate the pathophysiology of some rheumatological/neuromuscular and dermatological autoimmune diseases, and to develop new therapeutic strategies in immune-mediated diseases and hematology. In order to achieve this purpose, the different members of our multidisciplinary center, comprising biologists and clinicians from different medical specialties such as rheumatology, dermatology, clinical immunology, hematology and oncology, work together to develop collaborative clinical research networks. While fulfilling our research program, we aim to deliver quality immunology education to MD students, as well as providing PhD training for MDs, PharmDs and Biological Sciences students of the University of Rouen Normandy (UNIROUEN).
3. Tennessee, United States: Vanderbilt University Center for Immunobiology (VCI) is led by Jeffrey Rathmell, PhD. Collectively, the research of the VCI FCE investigators is focused on basic discovery in human immunology and treatment of immune-mediated diseases. These research programs provide excellent training opportunities in basic and clinical immunology, computational analyses, and human genetics for graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, as well as undergraduates.