Falk Hiepe
Professor
Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin
Berlin, Germany
Biography
Falk Hiepe, M.D., is Deputy Director of the Department of Rheumatology and Clinical Immunology at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin and leader of the Autoimmunology research group at the German Rheumatism Research Center – a Leibniz Institute in Berlin, Germany. Hiepe graduated from Berlin’s Medical School Charité at Humboldt University Berlin in 1976. He received board certification as an internist in 1983, and as a rheumatologist in 1994. He was crucially involved in setting up a laboratory for autoantibody diagnostics at Charité. In 1988, he completed his postdoctoral thesis on the diagnostic and pathogenetic relevance of autoantibodies in systemic lupus erythematosus at Humboldt University Berlin. Research stays brought him to the Department of Medicine and Physical Therapy (Head: T. Miyamoto) at the University of Tokyo, Japan, in 1987, and to the W. M. Keck Autoimmune Disease Center (Head: E. M. Tan) at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, USA, in 1995. Falk Hiepe was appointed as full professor in 1997. He is a member of the German Society of Rheumatology, the German Society of Immunology, the Henry Kunkel Society, and the IUIS/WHO/AF/CDC Committee for the Standardization of Autoantibodies. As principal investigator, he has participated in numerous clinical trials in rheumatic autoimmune diseases, especially systemic lupus erythematosus.
Research Interest
His clinical focus is on inflammatory rheumatic diseases, autoantibody diagnostics, treatment of connective tissue diseases and vasculitis, and extracorporeal and cell therapies, including stem cell therapy. His scientific interests include the diagnostic and pathogenetic significance of autoantibodies, the role of B and plasma cells in autoimmune diseases, and novel therapeutic approaches. His group was the first to identify and describe the role of long-lived memory plasma cells in autoimmunity. Because of their refractoriness to conventional immunosuppression and B-cell-targeted therapies, strategies targeting memory plasma cells are currently his main research focus.