At this year's Summer Symposium of the Department of Biomedicine (DBM), Hailey Kim and Mika Schneider received the DBM Paper Prize 2026. Both work in the Clinical Neuroimmunology Lab of Prof. Tobias Derfuss, and their award-winning paper was published in Cell earlier this year.
The study addresses a question that has long shadowed multiple sclerosis research. Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) is strongly associated with MS, and nearly everyone becomes infected with it, yet only a small proportion of people ever develop the disease. The team showed that a protective immune checkpoint normally eliminates myelin-reactive B cells entering the central nervous system — but that the EBV protein LMP1 can supply the survival signal these cells are missing, allowing them to persist, capture their target antigen and drive demyelination reminiscent of early MS lesions.
The paper was led by co-first authors Hailey Kim and Mika Schneider, with Nicholas Sanderson and Tobias Derfuss as senior authors.
Recognition like this reflects the science our teams do every day, and we are proud to share it. Great work by everyone involved, please join us in congratulating them.
--> Read the full announcement on the DBM website: https://biomedizin.unibas.ch/de/default-pages/news/details/congratulations-to-this-years-dbm-paper-prize-winners/
Publication:
Kim H, Schneider M, Raach Y, et al. Myelin antigen capture in the CNS by B cells expressing EBV latent membrane protein 1 leads to demyelinating lesion formation. Cell. 2026;189(3):603–619.e25. doi:10.1016/j.cell.2025.12.031
Links:
- Read the paper in Cell: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(25)01480-1
- DBM announcement: https://biomedizin.unibas.ch/de/default-pages/news/details/congratulations-to-this-years-dbm-paper-prize-winners/
- Our earlier coverage of the study: https://rc2nb.ch/blog/2026/01/14/a-clear-mechanistic-explanation-for-the-long-observed-link-between-ebv-and-ms/
Image: DBM_PaperPrize2026_KimSchneider_photo-ChesaCuan.jpg — caption "Hailey Kim and Mika Schneider receive the DBM Paper Prize 2026. (Photo: Chesa Cuan)"
