Immunology Foundation - New Delhi

The 10th International Congress of Immunology was held at New Delhi in 1998. It was the first time that this International Congress came to an economically developing country, where the number of immunologists, though growing, was small. The Congress, with a galaxy of Nobel Laureates and leaders in the field from all over the world presented to those in India the moving front in various facets of this exciting discipline. It provided impetus to the growth of this field, and the number of students undertaking research in immunology and related sciences has increased steadily. Besides basic research on some of the burning problems of biology for which the immune system offers invaluable experimental systems, Immunology has also beneficial aspects, those of making available highly sensitive and specific diagnosis and vaccines for prevention, and therapy of infections and auto-immune disorders. The range of vaccines including the recently developed recombinant vaccines made in India has expanded. There is scope for doing much more, of developing vaccines and recombinant therapeutic antibodies for a variety of infections prevalent in India and elsewhere.

Immunology Foundation is a registered non-profit Trust created from the savings of the Congress. Its charter is to promote the development of Immunology and Allied Sciences by initiatives and inputs in activities currently limited by ready availability of resources. The Foundation would provide support for short term training of investigators and for inter-laboratory exchange programmes. It would sponsor workshops and seminars on advancing frontiers of knowledge. It would promote Academia-Industry linkage for materialization of Products from research leads. The Foundation would give Awards to recognize outstanding contributions by Indian scientists in Immunology and related sciences. It would seek to create an information network and encourage co-operation between better endowed laboratories having methodologies, reagents and cell lines for sharing with others in Universities and peripheral research centers which are in need of such aids. The Foundation will also provide subsidies to enable Indian scientists to present their work and participate in important National and International meetings.
 
The Foundation has a Board of 8 Trustees. The late Prof. V. Ramalingaswami was the first Chairman of the Board of Trustees. Prof. N.K. Ganguly is currently the Chairman and Prof. G.P. Talwar is life time Managing Trustee. Other Trustees are Prof. Chandana Das, Dr. Satish K. Gupta, Dr. V.M Katoch, Prof. N.K. Mehra, Prof. Indira Nath, and Prof. L.M. Shrivastava. The President and the Secretary of the Indian Immunology Society are ex-officio members of the Board of Trustees. Special invitees to the Board at present are Dr. Sunil K. Arora, Dr. D. Balasubramanian, Dr. Dipankar Nandi, Dr. B. Ravindran, Dr. W. Selvamurthy, Dr. Chandrima Shaha and Dr. Mushtaq Siddiqi.

We look forward to all Indian and NRI Scientists working in the field of Immunology and Allied Sciences for their active co-operation and participation in the programmes of Immunology Foundation. We hope this web site will help in achieving the aims and objectives of the Foundation. We will welcome your comments and suggestions to further improve the contents of this Web site.