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Congratulations to this year’s DBM Paper Prize winners!
As every year, we celebrated the DBM Best Publication Award during our annual Summer Symposium today. This year, the award has a new name – the DBM Paper Prize – but its purpose remains the same: the prize recognizes an outstanding publication by researchers from our department. This year’s prize goes to Hailey Kim and Mika Schneider from the Clinical Neuroimmunology Lab for their publication “Myelin antigen capture in the CNS by B cells expressing EBV latent membrane protein 1 leads to demyelinating lesion formation”, published in Cell earlier this year as previously reported.
The award-winning paper was a joint effort led by co-first authors Hailey Kim and Mika Schneider, with Nicholas Sanderson and Tobias Derfuss as senior authors and contributions from many colleagues. It started with Hailey’s work during her PhD, in which she developed experimental models to study B-cell infiltration into the brain. These models allowed the team to follow autoreactive, myelin-specific B cells in the CNS and showed that, despite recognizing and capturing their target antigen, they were normally eliminated by a protective immune checkpoint.
This initial work was later extended with Mika to investigate a possible connection with Epstein-Barr virus (EBV). EBV has long been strongly associated with MS, but an important question remains: while almost everyone becomes infected with the virus, only a small proportion of people ever develop the disease. By providing an additional survival signal through the EBV protein LMP1, they showed that myelin-reactive B cells could bypass this tolerance checkpoint and drive demyelination reminiscent of early MS lesions. Their findings therefore offer a possible mechanism linking EBV infection, autoreactive B cells and the earliest stages of demyelinating lesion formation.
For the second time, the DBM also presented the Best Presentation Award, recognizing the most outstanding talk delivered during the Summer Symposium. This year, the award was presented to Dorssa Akbarifor her presentation titled “Rare germline SAMHD1 SAM-domain mutation associated with autosomal dominant type I interferonopathy”.
Congratulations to all the winners for their exceptional research achievements — we are proud to have such outstanding science taking place at our Department.