Pharmaceuticals Webinar | Therapies for Autoimmune Diseases
the chair
9th Pharmaceuticals Webinar
Therapies for Autoimmune Diseases
Dear colleagues and distinguished guests,
It is my great pleasure to welcome you to this webinar, organized in the context of our Special Issue, “Therapies for Autoimmune Diseases.” We are delighted to have you with us today and sincerely thank you for your interest and participation.
Autoimmune diseases affect a substantial proportion of the global population and represent a major public health challenge. Although these conditions are currently not curable, available therapies can provide meaningful clinical benefit and improve patients’ quality of life. However, commonly used treatments—particularly immunosuppressive agents—are associated with an increased risk of infections and, in some cases, malignancies. Therefore, there is a growing unmet need for more targeted and effective therapeutic strategies with improved safety profiles.
This webinar aims to provide a forum for discussion of novel therapeutic approaches for autoimmune diseases. It brings together perspectives from basic and clinical immunology, fostering interdisciplinary exchange and the sharing of emerging concepts that bridge fundamental research and clinical application.
We are pleased to welcome two distinguished invited speakers, who will present their work on different aspects of this topic. We hope that their presentations and discussions will further stimulate scientific curiosity and contribute to advances in the development of new and effective therapies for autoimmune diseases.
Thank you once again for joining us. We look forward to an engaging and fruitful webinar.
Warm regards,
Dr Athanasios Sachinidis
Date: 17 June 2026
Time: 10:00 am CEST | 11:00 am EEST | 4:00 pm CST Asia
Webinar ID: 842 8694 0694
Webinar Secretariat: journal.webinar@mdpi.com
Meet Our Speakers
Dr. Themis Alissafi
Medical School, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, Immune Regulation Laboratory, Biomedical Research Foundation, Academy of Athens (BRFAA), Greece;
Dr. Themis Alissafi is Assistant Professor at National & Kapodistrian University of Athens, School of Medicine, and Affiliated Researcher at Biomedical Research Foundation Academy of Athens (RFAA).
She pursued her BSc and MSc at the University of Crete (UOC). Her PhD at BRFAA focused on immunology. As an ERS and EAACI fellow she performed postdoctoral research in immunology at Gent University, IMBB and BRFAA. Since 2019 she is the Group Leader of the Immune Regulation laboratory at BRFAA and holds the position of the assistant professor in Biology at Medical School, NKUA.
Dr. Alissafi serves as the first European Research Council (ERC) Ambassador to Greece. She is the national representative of the European Network ENOTTA. She is the coordinator of the accelerated seminar on Biomedical Research Methodology and is a member of the steering committee of the Immunology MSc program at NKUA and lecturer of Immunology and Cancer Biology in five postgraduate programs.
The focus of her scientific work is on immunological tolerance networks. Her research team seeks mechanistic information on distinct regulatory cells involved in immune responses during autoimmunity and cancer, with a special focus on immune metabolism, in an effort to develop novel, precise therapeutic interventions and to discover innovative biomarkers.
Dr. Alissafi’s track-record includes publications, in major scientific journals (i.e. Cell Metabolism, Nature Medicine, JCI, Nature Communications, JEM, PNAS). During her scientific career, she had the honour to receive many prestigious international (ERS, EAACI, EWRR) and national (Kafatos, IKY, HELANI) awards. Her research has attracted > 2.0 million euros funding by the ERC STG 2020, and the HFRI.
Prof. Michael P. Gantier
Centre for Innate Immunity and Infectious Diseases, Hudson Institute of Medical Research, Australia, Department of Molecular and Translational Science, Monash University, Australia;
Prof Michael Gantier leads the Nucleic Acids and Innate Immunity laboratory at the Hudson Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne Australia. With over 20 years of expertise in RNA biology, his work focuses on harnessing RNA to modulate innate immune responses for therapeutic benefit. Trained as a biological engineer in France, he completed his PhD at University College Dublin before moving to Australia to work with Prof Bryan Williams on RNA therapeutics and innate immunity.
Since establishing his independent laboratory in 2015, Prof Gantier’s team has uncovered fundamental immunosuppressive mechanisms of RNA therapeutics, culminating in the discovery that RNA cleavage products mimic natural immune checkpoints against autoimmunity (Alharbi et al., Nature Immunology 2026). In collaboration with Noxopharm Ltd, his group has developed a novel class of ultra short RNA based anti inflammatory agents that have recently completed Phase 1 clinical trials (Sapkota et al. bioRxiv 2026). Prof Gantier has received multiple international awards, published extensively in leading journals (inc. Nature, Cell, Nature Immunology, Nature Communications, Nucleic Acids Research etc.), and currently serves as Section Editor of Molecular Therapy Nucleic Acids and board member of the international Nucleic Acid Immunity Society.
"Therapies for Autoimmune Diseases"
Guest Editors: Dr. Athanasios Sachinidis and Dr. Carlo Perricone
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 25 September 2026