Elmar Jaeckel
MD
Elmar Jaeckel is a trained gastroenterologist/hepatologist as well as endocrinologist/diabetologist and transplantation specialist. He is Medical Director of the Liver Transplant Program at the Ajmera Transplant Centre, University Health Network. He studied medicine at University of Hamburg, Yale University New Haven, University of California San Diego, University of Edinburgh and University of Sydney. He completed his medical training at the Hannover Medical School (MHH). He studied medical economics at the University of applied sciences in Hannover and received a bachelor as Medical Hospital Manager. He spent a four years postdoctoral research fellowship with Harald von Boehmer at the Harvard Medical School, Boston working on central and peripheral tolerance mechanisms. Since 2003, he has been leading the research group on immune tolerance and metabolic inflammation at the MHH. The group is focusing to establish tissue-specific tolerance in autoimmunity, transplantation and metabolic inflammation. Since 2008 he is attending for gastroenterology, hepatology, endocrinology and diabetology at Hannover Medical School. Since 2010 he has been the medical attending of the liver transplant program at MHH, one of the largest liver transplant programs within the Eurotransplant region. He was co-chairing the collaborative research center transplantation for 12 years (CRC738), the CRC on xenotransplantation (CRC TR127) funded by the German Research Foundation and the Integrated Research Center Transplantation (IFB-Tx) funded by Federal Ministry for research and education. Besides this he received funding from the German Research Foundation, Ministry of Health, European Community, Helmsley Foundation, Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.
He published numerous articles on viral hepatitis, autoimmune liver disease, autoimmune diabetes and transplantation tolerance. He developed tissue-specific regulatory T cell therapies for local tolerance induction. He has numerous patents on tolerance inducing therapies and is co-founder of Quell Therapeutics aiming to develop clinical therapies for tolerance induction with regulatory T cells.
He started investigator-initiated trials and participated in clinical Phase II to VI trials.
Since January 2022 he is medical director of the liver transplant program of the Ajmera transplant center at UHN. His research focusses on signatures of tolerance, individualized immunosuppression and cell/gene therapy for tolerance induction. Most recently, Dr. Elmar Jaeckel has been appointed as the Medical Director of the Islet Transplant Program as of June 1, 2024 which is the largest beta cell replacement program globally.