HEALTH 2030 - Key Persons

Job Titles:

• Director of Gastroenterology at the University Hospital of Bern

Andrew J. Macpherson is Professor of Medicine and Director of Gastroenterology at the University Hospital of Bern, Switzerland. He studied Biochemistry and Medicine at Cambridge University and did his PhD on sugar-proton symport systems in the laboratory of Sir Hans Kornberg and Peter Henderson. His clinical medical studies and clinical speciality training in Gastroenterology were in Cambridge and London. The results (of control experiments) during a project in London on immune-mediated damage to intestinal epithelial cells focused his interest on the way in which the mucosal immune system responds to commensal intestinal microbes. In 1997 he moved to work with Rolf Zinkernagel at the Institute of Experimental Immunology in Zürich. Between 2004 and 2008 he was Farncombe Professor of Medicine and a Canada Research Chair holder at McMaster University in Hamilton.His work has shown that there are different pathways of induction of immunoglobulin (Ig)A in the intestinal mucosa by commensal intestinal microbes, with and without help from T cells. He has also shown a compartmentalisation between the mucosal and systemic Ig responses to commensals, since mucosal immune responses are driven locally in the mucosal compartment by dendritic cells that have sampled commensals at the epithelial surface. More recently his lab has developed methods of reversible colonisation of germ-free mice to allow intestinal colonisation with commensals and mucosal immune priming to be experimentally uncoupled, to address mucosal immune memory and the functional consequences of mucosal immune responses in host-microbial mutualism.

Job Titles:

• Professor of Medicine, Vice - Dean

Antoine Geissbuhler is a Professor of Medicine, Vice-Dean for Humanitarian and International Affairs at Geneva University's Faculty of Medicine, Director of the Division of eHealth and Telemedicine at Geneva University Hospitals. He is also President of the Board of the Health-On-the-Net Foundation, Past-President of the International Medical Informatics Association, and Fellow of the American College of Medical Informaticians. He trained as a physician at Geneva University where he specialized in internal medicine, then, after a post-doctoral fellowship, became Associate Professor of biomedical informatics at Vanderbilt University. In 1999, he returned to Geneva to take the responsibility for the design and implementation of the medical information systems at Geneva University Hospitals. In 2010, the telemedicine and distance education activities lead to the establishment of the World Health Organization collaborating center for eHealth and telemedicine. Since 2015, he is also in charge of the Innovation Center of Geneva University Hospitals.

After obtaining an M.D. from the University of Geneva and completing a clinical training in pathology, internal medicine and infectious diseases in Geneva and at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Didier Trono embarked in a scientific career at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research of MIT. In 1990, he joined the faculty of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies to launch a center for AIDS research. He moved back to Europe seven years later, before taking the reins of the newly created EPFL School of Life Sciences, which he directed from 2004 to 2012. Didier Trono has had a long-standing interest for interactions between viruses and their hosts. This led him to study the biology of pathogens such as human immunodeficiency virus and hepatitis B virus, and to develop virus-based delivery systems for human gene therapy. Over the last ten years, his research shifted towards the field of epigenetics, to explore the impact of retroelements and their controlling mechanisms on the development and physiology of higher organisms, including humans.

Job Titles:

• Certified Physician
• Vice - Rector of the University of Lausanne

Giorgio Zanetti is currently Vice-Rector of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, in charge of education and student affairs. He represents his University on the executive board of H2030. He is also chairman of the Service of Hospital Preventive Medicine and Chief Physician in the Service of Infectious Diseases of the University Hospital of Lausanne. Giorgio Zanetti is a board-certified physician in infectious diseases and in internal medicine. As a full professor at the Faculty of Biology of Medicine at the University of Lausanne, he teaches the epidemiology of infections and clinical infectiology. He has been Director of the Medical School of this Faculty. His research focuses on prevention and control of healthcare-associated infections, and on optimization of antibiotic use in the context of growing bacterial resistance.