2023
DECEMBER 2023: Aimee is honored to be moving to Columbia University to become the Herbert and Florence Irving Professor and Chair of Dermatology. Columbia University Irving Medical Center and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital are advancing research initiatives in precision medicine and cellular immunotherapy, and we are excited to be at the forefront of these efforts. Come join our team at Columbia! We are hiring for postdoctoral fellows and staff scientists to drive projects on immune repertoire profiling, mechanisms of engineered cell therapies in human autoimmune disease clinical trials, and development of novel cellular immunotherapies for autoimmunity in humans and dogs.

OCTOBER 2023: Our publication describing the Externally Led Patient-Focused Drug Development Meeting at the United States Food and Drug Administration, spearheaded by the International Pemphigus and Pemphigoid Foundation (IPPF) and PEM Friends UK, is published in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology. This meeting was a critical element of the process to ensure that endpoints for future clinical trials in pemphigus and pemphigoid are responsive to the unmet needs of patients. View the web recording of the meeting at the IPPF website.

SEPTEMBER 2023: Congratulations to Assistant Professor Sangwook Oh, PhD, for his new position at Hallym University in South Korea! His laboratory will be focusing on the development of next-generation cellular immunotherapy technologies.
AUGUST 2023: Congratulations to Minh and team in the O’Connor lab for their publication in Acta Neuropathologica. Using their expertise in cloning B cell repertoires together with autoantibody mapping tools from Sangwook, they isolated acetylcholine receptor autoantibodies from myasthenia gravis patients and showed that individual antibodies are often multi-functional, causing disease through more than one mechanism, including complement activation, receptor blockade, and/or antigen modulation.
JANUARY 2023: Congratulations to Sangwook, Xuming, Silvio, and the rest of the Payne lab team for the publication of our MuSK-CAART study in Nature Biotechnology. Silvio wrote a synopsis of the study for Nature Portfolio Bioengineering Community.