Prof. Guillermo Dighiero

graduated from University of Montevideo , Uruguay , in 1969. He completed his doctoral degree and Ph.D. in 1977 and 1978 at the University of Paris, France. In 1984 Dr. Dighiero was appointed Professor and Head of the Laboratory of Immunohematology and Immunopathology at the Pasteur Institute. Since 1991 he is a Top Degree Research Director at CNRS. Between 1998 and 2001 he was the Head of the Department of Physiopathology at the Pasteur Institute.

At present Prof. Gighiero is also the Chairman of the French Cooperative Group on Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia. Among the most outstanding scientific achievements of Prof. Dighiero is his contribution towards the concept of natural autoantibodies (NAAB) and description of the NAAB system, which we believe represents an important component of the immune system and should play a key role in natural immunity. Moreover, Prof. Dighiero is the pioneer in the studies on the biology of chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL). He discovered that CLL B lymphocytes are characterized by low expression of surface membrane immunoglubulines (Ig). Prof. Dighiero has also found that CLL B cells frequently correspond with the expansion of a B cell clone, resulting in the secretion of NAAB and use a restricted set of V genes. Another important discovery of Prof. Dighiero was that the mutational pattern of V genes allows segregating CLL patients in two groups: those expressing the unmutated V genes and those expressing the mutated ones. Another significant contribution of Prof. Dighiero were his prognostic and therapeutic studies in CLL patients. In this field, together with Jacques-Louis Binet, Prof. Dighiero described a three-stage prognostic classification, which has been adopted simultaneously with the Rai's staging system as the international reference prognostic classification, very important in planning therapeutical strategies. He was also involved in several randomised trials implementing novel chemotheraputic strategies to CLL treatment. Prof. Dighiero is an author of 162 papers in high indexed, peer-reviewed journals such as Blood, Leukemia, New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of Clinical Oncolology, Journal of Immunology and many books and chapters.