The WAO Henning Løwenstein Research Award
To a scientist who has shown excellence within the field of allergy
Winner 2009: Stephen James Till
Stephen Till started his career in 1993 when he was working on a PhD-project entitled “Mechanisms of Asthma” together with Professor Barry Kay at the Imperial College in London.
Today he is busy completing training within internal medicine in order to become an adult allergist, so Stephen Till has certainly devoted his life to allergy.
While he was busy finalizing his medical training he also managed to continue his laboratory research focusing on allergic patients’ immune response to grass pollen, and induction of tolerance following allergen specific immunotherapy. Stephen Till has written over 30 original articles as well as reviews and book chapters within this subject.
His latest piece of work was a Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology paper highlighted by the Journal as an ‘Editor’s Choice’ article. The study represented the first study which was looking for very early markers of tolerance induction during immunotherapy with a grass pollen vaccine. Interestingly, increasing concentrations of circulating IL-10 was an extremely early event indicating the induction of regulatory T cells which by far precedes the induction of allergen specific ‘blocking IgG’ antibodies.