BIOGRAPHY

Dr Mireia Sospedra PhD
Neurology Dept
University Hospital Zurich
Zürich, Switzerland

Biographical Sketch

Mireia Sospedra studied biology at the University of Barcelona and received her PhD on the induction of central tolerance to peripheral antigens at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in 1998. After her PhD she moved to Paris in 1999 where she pursued a first postdoc at la Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital studying the interaction between T cells and dendritic cells in the absence of nominal antigen. In April 2001 she obtained a competitive fellowship from the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke (NINDS; at the National Institutes of Health (NIH)) and moved to USA for a second postdoc. She started working about Multiple Sclerosis (MS) with a focus on the identification of new autoantigens. After four years at NIH, she returned to Barcelona in 2005 with a career development grant/assistant professorship of the Catalan Institute for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA) at the Neuroimmunology Unit (Vall d’Hebron Hospital). In 2007 she moved to Hamburg and started working at Institute of Neuroimmunology and Multiple Sclerosis Research (Center of Molecular Neurobiology Hamburg, University Hospital Eppendorf) as independent investigator studying T cell specificity in MS and the role of neutrophils. Between September 2011 and August 2022, she headed the Laboratory of Neuroimmunology at the Neuroimmunology and Multiple Sclerosis Research Section at the Neurology Clinic, University Hospital Zurich, and University of Zurich. Since August 2022 she is working as senior scientist at Cellerys AG, which was founded in 2015 as a spin-out from the University of Zurich and in 2021 entered a partnership with Novartis to develop RED4MS, a multi-center Phase II clinical trial to induce antigen-specific tolerance in MS. Mireia Sospedra is co-founder and co-owner of Cellerys AG.