Nils Erik Gilhus

Nils Erik Gilhus is Professor (emeritus) in neurology at University of Bergen, Norway since 1987 and a senior researcher at Haukeland University Hospital, Bergen, Norway. He was a senior consultant in neurology from 1986, and previous dean and head of department at these institutions. Gilhus has during many years had a leadership role in national and international scientific and health organizations such as European Academy of Neurology, European Federation of Neurological Societies, European School of Neuroimmunology, Norwegian Brain Council, Norwegian Neurological Society, and Norwegian Medical Association. Gilhus has published more than 500 scientific papers, mainly on neuroimmunology and neuroepidemiology, centred on myasthenia gravis. He has supervised more than 30 accomplished PhDs and been a partner of 6 EU research projects, coordinating three of them.

Marc de Baets

Rozen Le Panse is Director of Research at CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research, France) and team leader at the Research of Center of Myology (Sorbonne University/INSERM) at La Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris.

Her research activities are focused on the understanding of the etiological and pathophysiological mechanisms involved in autoimmune myasthenia gravis. Her research team is also largely involved in investigating new therapeutic approaches by developing and using different experimental models. Besides, her team is also searching for biomarkers for patient monitoring using new technological approaches.

Angela Vincent

Angela Vincent is Emeritus Professor of Neuroimmunology. She established and led the Oxford University Neuroimmunology Service for 25 years until 2016, and was Head of Clinical Neurology (2005-2008) and an associate editor of Brain (2004–2013). Her research includes clinical and serological studies on patients with myasthenia gravis and acquired disorders of the CNS associated with antibodies to receptors, ion channels and associated proteins. These include IgG4 antibodies to MuSK, CASPR2 and LGI1. She also pioneered studies on maternal antibodies to fetal-specific proteins causing developmental disorders. Although medically-qualified she is not a neurologist; but has received several national and international awards for contributions to clinical neurology and neuropsychiatry.

Amelia Evoli

Supervisor of R4

Dr. Maartje G. Huijbers is Associate Professor and Principal investigator at the Department of Human Genetics and the Department of Neurology at LUMC in Leiden, The Netherlands. 

Together with her team, she has a special interest in autoimmune disorders of the neuromuscular synapse. This includes myasthenia gravis and Lambert-Eaton myasthenic syndrome. She is a neuroimmunologist with past research experience ranging from identifying new autoantigens for central nervous system autoimmune diseases, to developing new in vitro and in vivo models to study these disorders and their pathomechanisms. Her translational research, in close collaboration with clinicians, now focuses on understanding the role of (IgG4) autoantibodies and B cells and their characteristics in these diseases and testing new therapeutics in the aforementioned preclinical models. One of these therapeutics stems from her own research and, together with a pharmaceutical partner, she is currently testing this in a phase I clinical trial. The unique functional characteristics of IgG4 fascinate her and in this consortium, she therefore aims to develop a rodent model that allows for studying human-like IgG4 responses.

Lidia Sabater

Her work combines translational, molecular, and clinical approaches to advance understanding of antibody-mediated encephalopathies. She has led projects on neurodegenerative mechanisms driven by autoantibodies, significantly contributing to biomarker discovery and therapeutic innovation in neuroimmunology. Dr. Lidia Sabater is the coordinator of MSCA-DN IGNITION consortium.

Paul Parren

Supervisor of R6

His group conducts basic and translational research aiming to understand the role of the humoral immune response in disease and to optimize biopharmaceutical therapies. To achieve this, the team develops biophysical and immunochemical methodology to investigate structure-function relationships of immunoglobulins in a basic and clinical setting. A particular focus are IgG4 antibody responses, as these antibodies have unique structural features that contribute to their non-inflammatory profile, but at the same time feature prominently as pathogenic autoantibodies in a number of autoimmune diseases and may develop against therapeutic proteins.