Tobias Lanz

Institute for Immunity, Transplantation, and Infection
Stanford School of Medicine
Stanford, CA | USA

Tobias Lanz, MD is an assistant professor at the Institute for Immunity, Transplantation, and Infection and the Division of Immunology and Rheumatology at Stanford. His research focuses on B cell biology in autoimmune and neuroimmunological diseases. He uses high-throughput screening technologies, and methods from structural and cell biology to identify new autoantigens and to understand how self-reactive B cells escape tolerance. He is particularly interested in molecular mechanisms that explain the association between Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV) and autoimmunity. Dr. Lanz went to medical school at the Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen, Germany and at the University College of London. He wrote his MD thesis with Dr. Michael Platten at the Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research in Tübingen, Germany before joining Dr. Lawrence Steinman’s laboratory at Stanford as a research scholar. After medical school he pursued his scientific and clinical training at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and the Department of Neurology at the University Hospital in Heidelberg, Germany. In 2015 he joined Dr. William Robinson’s lab at Stanford, where he investigated environmental triggers of autoimmunity, including viruses and milk consumption. In his most recent work, he characterized B cell repertoires in the spinal fluids of patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) and identified molecular mimicry between EBV EBNA1 and the glial cellular adhesion molecule GlialCAM as a driver of neuroinflammation (Lanz et al., Nature, 2022). His long-term objective is to further understand how viruses contribute to autoimmunity and to develop next-generation targeted antiviral and antigen-specific therapeutics to treat autoimmune diseases.