Roland Martin MD

Roland Martin is a full professor for neurology and neuroimmunology at the University Zurich and heads the Neuroimmunology and Multiple Sclerosis Research Section and MS outpatient clinic at the University Hospital Zurich. He trained in medicine and specialized in neurology at the University of Wurzburg. He pursued post-doctoral fellowships in immunology, virology and neuroimmunology in Wurzburg and at the Neuroimmunology Branch, National Institutes of Health (NIH), Bethesda, USA, where he worked as a tenured senior investigator until 2005. Subsequently, he held full professorships in Barcelona (Vall D´Hebron University Hospital), Hamburg (Director of the Institute for Neuroimmunology and Clinical MS Research, University Hamburg) and now in Zurich.

The main interests of his group are disease mechanisms of multiple sclerosis (MS), cellular immunology, disease mechanisms of JC polyoma virus-mediated progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML) and developing novel treatments for MS and PML besides providing care for MS patients in one of the largest MS centers in Switzerland. He and his group developed more than 10 projects from idea to early clinical proof-of-concept trials. One of these projects (Daclizumab, an anti-CD25 monoclonal antibody; Zinbryta was just approved for the treatment of MS by EMA, FDA and Swissmedic. He is a member of the Kuratorium of the Jung Foundation for Science, Hamburg, of the core faculty of the Wyss Translational Center Zurich, a co-founder of the Drug Discovery Network Zurich (DDNZ), and of the Therapy Development Accelerator (TDA) at the University Zurich.