The InFLAMES (Innovation Ecosystem Based on the Immune System) Flagship funded by the Academy of Finland has invited new visiting professors.  Two of them, Professor Petter Brodin and Dr Simon Goodman are hosted by Turku Bioscience. Their terms will last until the end of 2024.

Professor Petter Brodin is a professor in Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm and the head of the Mass cytometry facility at the SciLifeLab laboratory. After his term as a postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford Medical School, he has actively studied the human immune system with Mass cytometry in addition to obtaining his clinical qualifications. He is a visiting professor at Linköping University, specialising in children’s immunology.

Brodin has many positions of trust and in recent years, he has e.g. worked as an external advisor to the Swedish Olympic Committee and Sweden’s COVID-19 vaccine coordinator Richard Bergström. In his re-search, Petter Brodin applies multiomics approach to understand human immune systems.

Professor Riitta Lahesmaa has high expectations for the co-operation with Brodin.

– Petter significantly strengthens our immunoprofiling unit and tightens our collaboration with his unit at Karolinska Institutet. His research focuses on the development of immune system in early life, and its importance for health and disease is very topical and highly synergistic for InFLAMES research.

Dr Simon Goodman is a consultant for the international non-profit organization the Antibody Society, specialising in validation of antibodies. He retired from his position as Principal Scientist at Merck KGaA a few years ago. Goodman worked with Merck from 1993 to 2017, most recently leading an immunohistology group in Oncology preclinical pharmaceutical research. During this time, he was developing and validating antibodies for clinical biomarker analysis.

Prior to that, he was principal scientist of a drug development team developing treatment of glioblastomas. This followed 15 years as head of a cell-biology laboratory in Merck, where he was involved in drug discovery.

– Simon Goodman has decades of experience in drug development within the pharmaceutical industry. He is experienced in the process of drug discovery, taking compound to Phase 3 trials, which is valuable experience to be shared with InFLAMES, says Professor Johanna Ivaska.