SVAR COMPLEMENT EXCELLENCE AWARD

WHO IS ELIGIBLE FOR THE AWARDS?

Minimum requirements for those eligible are:

• Must have a Ph.D.
• 1 prize is reserved for someone with 5-12 years of active research after Ph.D. has been completed
• 1 prize is reserved for someone with 13-20 years of active research after Ph.D. has been completed

Although considerations will be given to the number of publications, impacts, citations, etc. the final decision will be based on the experts of the complement field in the committee, who will evaluate the past and future projects, the effect of the findings for both understanding the complement system further as well as for the future therapeutic and/or diagnostic potentials.

The Svar Complement Excellence Award serves to increase the awareness of the complement system and help fund important research that increases our understanding of this essential part of the immune system

Prof. Anna Blom
Lund University, Malmö, Sweden

Blom has made significant contributions to understanding the role of the complement system in various pathologies, including infections, rheumatic diseases, cancer, and immune deficiencies. Her research has primarily focused on complement inhibitors, such as C4b-binding protein, factor I, factor H, and CSMD1. More recently, she has explored the role of complement in diabetes and contributed to the discovery of a novel field of intracellular complement. 

Anna Blom is a member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences and the president-elect of the International Complement Society. 

Prof. Christina Lamers
Institute of Drug Discovery, Leipzig University, Germany

Christina Lamers is a Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the Institute of Drug Discovery, University Leipzig since 2022. She studied pharmaceutical sciences at the Goethe-University of Frankfurt/Main (Germany) and received her PhD in Pharmaceutical Chemistry from the Goethe-University Frankfurt/Main in Germany in 2014. In 2015 she joined the Laboratory of Therapeutic Proteins and Peptides of Prof. Christian Heinis at the EPFL (Lausanne, Switzerland) as a post-doctoral fellow, focusing on bicyclic peptides as therapeutics and their identification by phage display. During this postdoc she won a Marie-Curie individual fellowship. In November 2017 she joined the group of Prof. Daniel Ricklin, University of Basel (Switzerland), as a senior postdoc to develop cyclic peptides as complement inhibitors, working on the compstatin family.

Her current research interests are the identification of cyclic peptides by phage display and their development as therapeutics to target the innate immune system, with focus on the intrinsic coagulation and the complement cascade.  

Prof. Christoph Schmidt
Institute of Experimental Pharmacology, Institute of Experimental and Clinical Pharmacology, Toxicology and Pharmacology of Natural Products, University of Ulm, Germany

Prof. Christoph Schmidt is a Professor of Experimental Pharmacology at the Institute of Experimental and Clinical Pharmacology, Toxicology and Pharmacology of Natural Products, University of Ulm Medical Center. He studied pharmaceutical sciences at the LMU Munich (Germany) and received his Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh (United Kingdom; under the guidance of Prof. Barlow), working on the structure and function of the central part of complement factor H. After his studies, Dr. Schmidt moved to the US for his postdoc, where he worked at the Innate Immunity/protein Chemistry laboratory (under the guidance of Prof. Lambris), working on developing a complement inhibitor. 
 
Since 2017 he has been a group leader at the Institute of Pharmacology of Natural Products and Clinical Pharmacology at Ulm University in Germany. After a short stay as a Professor of Biochemical Pharmacy at the Martin-Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, he was appointed Professor of Experimental Pharmacology at the University of Ulm Medical Center. He and his team use numerous biochemical and biophysical techniques to investigate the complement system to design new therapeutic molecules. His work has made fundamental contributions to the complement field, which includes his extensive work on how the cascade is organized and regulated. 

Asso. Prof. Hrishikesh Kulkarni
Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Washington University School of Medicine, Washington, USA

Dr Hrishikesh Kulkarni is an Associate Professor of Medicine and Molecular Microbiology (starting 7/1/2024) and a physician-scientist in the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the Washington University School of Medicine. The overarching goal of his NIH-funded research program is to determine how locally active innate immune proteins can be harnessed to mitigate the risk of acute lung injury in various settings such as infection and lung transplantation, to ultimately reduce the burden of end-stage lung disease.

His translational research program thus functions at the intersection of clinical medicine, immunology, microbiology, and molecular biology by spanning across cell culture systems to leveraging human specimens. A major focus of his work involves distinguishing the role of locally-derived complement proteins in the lung from those present in the blood, and how they modulate the development of acute lung injury. 

 

Prof. Kristina Nilsson Ekdahl
Department of Immunology, Genetics and Pathology, Clinical Immunology, Uppsala University, Sweden

Kristina Nilsson Ekdahl is a professor of immunology at the Rudbeck Laboratory, Department of Immunology, Genetics and Pathology, Clinical Immunology at Uppsala University, Sweden, as well as at the Linnaeus University, Sweden. She is the head of the Linnaeus University Centre for Biomaterials Chemistry and is currently a board member of the European Complement Network. 

Kristina Nilsson Ekdahl has for 35 years been engaged in research regarding the regulation of innate immunity, in particular complement, including a number of pioneer studies of platelet-mediated extracellular phosphorylation of plasma proteins. Her publication list (225 papers) covers translational research ranging from basal studies, e.g., the crystal structure of complement component C3, to clinical studies of innate immunity system dysregulation. 

Prof. Trent Woodruff
The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

Trent Woodruff is an NHMRC Investigator Fellow leading a research team at The University of Queensland (UQ). He has over 20 years of research training in complement pharmacology and holds an Academic Professorship within the School of Biomedical Sciences, UQ. In 2014, he was presented with an Early Career Award from the International Complement Society and now serves as President-elect of the Society.

Trent is also Chair of the 2025 International Complement Workshop. Dr. Woodruff’s research revolves around complement, its links to inflammasomes, and its role in neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and Parkinson's disease. Using a series of complement and inflammasome inhibitors developed in collaboration with his group, he elucidates the therapeutic potential of targeting neuroinflammation to treat brain disease. His work has also contributed to a greater understanding of the complexity between naphylatoxin receptors in modulating the inflammatory response in health and during disease.

Dr. Anna Schubart, 
Novartis BioMedical Research, Basel, Switzerland 

Anna Schubart is a Senior Principal Investigator in the Immunology Research department of Novartis Pharma AG. She studied Biology at the Goethe-University of Frankfurt/Main (Germany), University of Edinburgh (UK) and Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich (Germany) and did her PhD at the Max-Planck-Institute for Neurobiology, department of Neuroimmunology with Prof. Christopher Linington on a rat model for Multiple Sclerosis (MS).

She joined the laboratory of Vijay K Kuchroo at Brigham and Women’s hospital in Boston, MA (USA) in 2002 to work on the role of Th1-specific cell surface molecules and their role in experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE), an animal model of MS. In 2004, Anna joined Apoxis SA in Lausanne as a Senior Scientist to develop new potential drugs regulating T cell activation. In 2006, she moved to the Novartis Institutes of Biomedical Research in Basel (Neuroscience), to demonstrate direct effects of S1P receptor modulators fingolimod (Gilenya) and siponimod (Mayzent) on the CNS and profile additional molecules as potential new drugs for Multiple Sclerosis (MS).

Since 2008, Anna is working in the department for Immunology at Novartis Biomedical Research, where she started to work on inhibitors of the alternative complement pathway in 2011. She accompanied the development of the oral factor B inhibitor LNP023 until its approval for Paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria (PNH) in 2023 and is still supporting this project for scientific support to PNH and the other indications.