Eicke Latz studied medicine in Göttingen and Berlin and worked as an intensive care physician at the Charité Hospital in Berlin. Starting 2000 he received post-doctoral training at Boston University and UMass Medical School, where he joined the UMass faculty in 2006. In 2010 he returned to Germany and founded the Institute of Innate Immunity at the University Hospital of the University of Bonn. He now works together with a growing international group of scientists from more than 30 nations. In 2020, he built a Department structure at the Institute of Innate Immunity allowing for interdisciplinary approaches to tackle research questions in immunology and inflammation research. Since 2024 he is the director of the German Rheumatism Research Center (DRFZ) in Berlin. He co-founded several biotech companies including IFM Therapeutics (2017), Dioscure Therapeutics (2020), a 'Stealth' biotech' (2020), and Odyssey Therapeutics (2021), which translate his discoveries into novel therapeutics and preventive approaches. He is a highly cited scientist in immunology yearly since 2014, and he has received prestigious awards, such as the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize in 2018.
The Eicke Latz laboratory focuses on identifying the most proximal mechanisms of innate immune activation involved in mediating autoinflammatory and chronic inflammatory diseases.
The lab employs systems immunology, unbiased experimental biology and human trials to decipher how the innate immune system maintains immune homeostasis or contributes to the pathogenesis of inflammatory diseases.
The uncovered mechanisms of innate immune activation can be relevant to a range of auto-inflammatory, auto-immune and chronic inflammatory diseases. Thus, their disease relevance is typically tested using a range of preclinical models and human translational studies with biomaterial from patients and observational clinical trials.
The lab has identified novel therapeutic targets and spun-out several biotech companies to translate the basic research findings into novel medicines and preventative approaches.
