Park Seong-hoe

Seong Hoe Park (born October 3, 1947) is a Korean immunologist and pathologist and a distinguished professor of pathology at the Seoul National University College of Medicine. He served as the chair of the Department of Pathology (2000–2004), the chair of the Graduate Program of Immunology (2002–2006), the president of Center for Animal Resource Development (2004–2006) at Seoul National University. He was the president of the Korean Association of Immunologists (2000–2001). Throughout his career as a T cell immunologist, Park established the theory of T cell-T cell interaction in human thymus, in which T cells expressing MHC class II drive previously unrecognized types of T cells and provide another significant developmental mechanism of T cells.

Another important achievement of his research is the induction of antigen-specific T cell tolerance, which has been a distant dream of immunologists for pinpoint-targeted control of the immune system. He successfully inhibited porcine pancreatic islet graft rejection in primates by preconditioning the host for the development of tolerogenic dendritic cells before the xenotransplantation (J Exp Med. 208:2477-2488, 2011). In this experiment, Park suggested a theoretical base of the prevention of graft rejection and the treatment of autoimmune diseases without serious complication. He also found the novel antigen JL1 on thymocytes, which has been developed as a therapeutic target for leukemia.

Today he is the director of the Transplantation Research Institute at the Seoul National University College of Medicine, and his team is conducting the basic research on the induction of T cell tolerance and the application of it to various immune diseases. Provided by Wikipedia