Hans-Uwe Simon - Biography#

Hans-Uwe Simon is currently a Professor of Pharmacology at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Bern, Switzerland. He was the Director of the Institute of Pharmacology (2000-2021) and Dean of the Faculty of Medicine (2016-2020). Recently, he was appointed as President of the Brandenburg Medical School in Germany, but he still serves as Deputy Director of the Institute of Pharmacology of the University of Bern.

Hans-Uwe Simon is German by birth. He studied Medicine (1980-86) and defended his doctoral thesis (Dr. med.) at the University of Jena, Germany. He did his medical specialization in Clinical Immunology, University of Jena (1986-90), and his postdoctoral training (1990-92) at the Mount Sinai and General Hospitals, University of Toronto, Canada (1990-92). Hans-Uwe Simon was a Principal Investigator and Deputy Director (1992-2000) at the Swiss Institute of Allergy and Asthma Research, Davos, Switzerland, and received his “Habilitation” in Experimental Immunology at the University of Zurich (1996). He also holds a PhD degree in Pharmacology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel (1996-2001).

Among other academic and administrative services, Hans-Uwe Simon served as President of the Swiss Society of Pharmacology and Toxicology (SSPT; 2004-2007), President of the Swiss Society of Experimental Pharmacology (SSEP; 2005-2008), President of the European Cell Death Society (ECDO; 2007-2009), President of the Union of the Swiss Societies for Experimental Biology (USSBE; 2007-2010), and President of the International Eosinophil Society (IES; 2013-2015).

Hans-Uwe Simon’s scientific contributions have been recognized with numerous awards, including the Paul Martini Prize of German Society of Internal Medicine (1997), the Georg Friedrich Götz Prize of the University of Zurich (2000), the Pfizer Research Prize (2003) and the Phoenix Pharmacy Science Prize (2020). He is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences. He received honorary doctorates (Dr. h.c.) of the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia (2017), and the Medical University of Chelyabinsk, Russia (2021).

Hans-Uwe Simon serves on the Editorial Boards of prestigious scientific journals and has been the Editor-in-Chief of Allergy, the leading European journal in the field of allergy and clinical immunology, for 8 years. Currently, he is Editor-in Chief of two journals; Int. Arch. Allergy Immunol. and Cell Death & Disease.

Main scientific achievements:

Hans-Uwe Simon is known for the discovery that inhibition of eosinophil apoptosis constitutes a major step for the development of tissue eosinophilia (J. Immunol. 1997). Simon has explored the fine mechanisms of eosinophil and neutrophil apoptosis, the molecular pathways that explain the inhibition of cell death in granulocytes, as well as how these pathways are negatively controlled (e.g., Nature Medicine 2002). Recently, he discovered under which conditions, eosinophils undergo necroptosis under both in vitro and in vivo conditions (J. Allergy Clin. Immunol. 2017). Moreover, his group was the first demonstrating that the scaffold of extracellular bacteria-killing traps consists of mitochondrial DNA (Nature Medicine 2008) and unrevealed the source of energy required for this process (Nature Communications 2018). In addition, he has demonstrated the role of deficient autophagy in tumorigenesis (Science Translational Medicine 2013). Similar to his approach to understand the regulation of apoptosis, he discovered signaling pathways negatively controlling the autophagic pathway (Science Signaling 2017). Moreover, his group pioneered the understanding of the cross-talk between apoptosis and autophagy (Nature Cell Biology 2006) as well as between autophagy and mitotic catastrophe (Nature Communications 2013). In eosinophils, he characterized the role of autophagy for eosinophil functions (Blood 2021).

Hans-Uwe Simon has also been a pioneer in describing and characterizing new disease entities, including a new disease among the hypereosinophilic syndromes with the clonal expansion of cytokine-producing T cells (J. Exp. Med. 1996; N. Engl. J. Med. 1999) as well as new inflammatory diseases of the esophagus (eosinophilic esophagitis and eosinophilic esophagitis-like disease). His work in the field of hypereosinophilic syndromes resulted in a new definition and classification of these diseases (J. Allergy Clin. Immunol. 2010). Moreover, Hans-Uwe Simon largely contributed to the development of the first specific anti-eosinophil drug (N. Engl. J. Med. 2003 and 2008) which is now available on the market (mepolizumab). He also pioneered the development of topical corticosteroids for the treatment of eosinophilic esophagitis (Gastroenterology 2010) that is now accepted as first-line therapy for these patients. In 2019, Expertscape's algorithms placed Simon in the top 0.1% of scholars writing about “Eosinophils” (http://www.expertscape.com/ex/eosinophils).