Journal of Clinical and Cellular Immunology
Open Access
ISSN: 2155-9899
ISSN: 2155-9899
Panayiotis Vlachoyiannopoulos
Department of Pathophysiology, Oncology Unit, Athens University School of Medicine, Laikon General Hospital, Athens, Greece
Dr Vlachoyiannopoulos was born in 1958. He graduated in Medicine from the University of Ioannina, Greece in 1983. After receiving his degree, Dr Vlachoyiannopoulos trained in clinical Immunology at the Royal National Hospital for Rheumatic Diseases at Bath UK with professor P.J.Maddison and later he returned to the University of Ioannina when he worked in research under the supervision of professor Haralampos M. Moutsopoulos. At present, he is an Associate Professor of Medicine-Immunology at the Medical School of the National University of Athens. He has published 83 papers (h factor 22, m factor 0.86, nearly 2500 citations), concerning the clinical presentation, the epidemiology and pathogenic aspects of systemic autoimmune connective tissue diseases. His major research interests are the antiphospholipid syndrome (APS) and systemic sclerosis (SSc) He has described rare, but important for the disease outcome, clinical characteristics of APS, such as APS related avascular necrosis of the femoral head, APS nephropathy or catastrophic forms of APS, as well as therapeutic modalities of APS. Recently he has described a novel mechanism of initiation of thrombosis in APS, which is based in the construction of immunogenic as well as thrombogenic complexes constituted by two molecules of β2 Glycoprotein I (β2GPI) in complex with tetramers of Platelet factor 4 (PF4); these complexes are better recognized by anti-phospholipid antibodies. He has also described the Immunogenetic and clinical aspects of SSc among Greeks, the mapping of the B-cell epitopes of Topoisomerase-I and their association with pulmonary fibrosis, as well as therapeutic strategies of pulmonary fibrosis in SSc.
epidemiology and pathogenic aspects of systemic autoimmune connective tissue diseases