Fraunhofer ITEM's clinical investigators

Prof. Jens Hohlfeld is a pulmonologist and allergist who trained at the Hannover Medical School. After 10 years of working in different university clinics, he devoted himself to clinical research and established the Clinical Research Unit at the Fraunhofer Institute in Hannover. He was head of the institute’s Clinical Airway Research Department for 10 years and eventually became Division Director of Airway Research in 2011.

In addition, Prof. Hohlfeld has been a full academic professor in airway research and aerosol medicine at the Hannover Medical School since 2005. He has made many contributions to basic and clinical research on the pathogenesis and treatment of airway diseases. In particular, he has spent a number of years studying the role of pulmonary surfactant in innate and adaptive immunity.

He has developed several clinical challenge models with environmental allergens, endotoxins, and ozone for proof-of-concept studies. Monitoring of airway inflammation is his current focus, and he holds several patents for approaches to monitoring airway inflammation.

Prof. Hohlfeld is a member of the American Thoracic Society (ATS), the European Respiratory Society (ERS), the International Society of Aerosols in Medicine (ISAM), and the German Respiratory Society. He works as a reviewer for the German Research Foundation and a variety of international scientific journals. In recent years, he has authored or coauthored more than 150 scientific publications.

Publications by Prof. Jens Hohlfeld

Prof. Antje Prasse is a respiratory specialist and renowned expert in the field of interstitial lung diseases (ILD), who received her training at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg, Germany. She has dedicated her career to clinical and translational pulmonary research and was head of the ILD center at the University Medical Center Freiburg for seven years. She made major contributions to translational research in the ILD field, e.g. a publication on the first serum biomarker predictive of mortality in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF). Owing to her track record in personalized medicine and biomarkers she was appointed to a visiting professorship at Yale University (host Prof. Naftali Kaminski) for the period 2013/2014.

In 2014, she transferred to the Hannover Medical School and Fraunhofer ITEM in Hannover, Germany. At the Hannover Medical School she established a clinical ILD center which, within 15 months only, rapidly developed to one of Germany’s largest tertiary ILD centers, now following more than 500 ILD patients including more than 100 IPF patients. Multiple clinical trials are currently ongoing. In parallel with her work at the Hannover Medical School, Prof. Prasse is head of a research group at Fraunhofer ITEM that is being funded by the Fraunhofer Attract program. Over the past years, her group has gained expertise in several omics techniques and has established in-vitro models as well as a humanized mouse model of IPF. In 2015, Prof. Prasse received the Research Award on Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis of the European Respiratory Society.

Publications by Prof. Antje Prasse

Dr. Philipp Badorrek graduated from the Hannover Medical School in 2004 and has been a board-accredited clinical pharmacologist since 2010. He joined Fraunhofer ITEM in 2005.

Having worked as an investigator in clinical trials and group leader for clinical operations for several years, he became head of the Department of Clinical Airway Research in 2011. Dr. Badorrek has extensive experience in designing and conducting early-phase clinical trials with a focus on medications for treating asthma, COPD, and allergic rhinitis.

Publications by Dr. Philipp Badorrek