Jonathan Kipnis


Jonathan Kipnis is a neuroscientist and professor of pathology and immunology at the Washington University School of Medicine. His lab studies interactions between the immune system and nervous system,. He is best known for his lab's discovery of meningeal lymphatic vessels in humans and mice, which has impacted research on neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease and multiple sclerosis, cognitive and mental disorders, and neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism and Rett syndrome.

Education and career

Kipnis received his bachelor's degree in biology from Tel Aviv University. He received his PhD in neurobiology and neuroimmunology from the Weizmann Institute of Science, where he was advised by Michal Schwartz. He was awarded a Prize of Excellence from the Knesset in 2004. Kipnis joined the University of Virginia School of Medicine in 2007, where he later became a Harrison Distinguished Professor and chair of the department of neuroscience. He also directed the Center for Brain Immunology and Glia at UVA. In 2019, he accepted an offer to join the Washington University School of Medicine faculty via the BJC Investigators Program. He is primarily appointed in the department of pathology and immunology, and secondarily appointed in neurology, neuroscience, and neurosurgery.

Discoveries

Meningeal lymphatic vessels

Kipnis is credited with the 2014 discovery of meningeal lymphatic vessels, a recently discovered network of conventional lymphatic vessels located parallel to the dural sinuses and meningeal arteries of the mammalian central nervous system. As a part of the lymphatic system, the meningeal lymphatics are responsible for draining immune cells, small molecules, and excess fluid from the CNS and into the deep cervical lymph nodes.
While it was initially believed that both the brain and meninges were devoid of lymphatic vasculature, the landmark Nature paper by Jonathan Kipnis and his postdoctoral fellow Antoine Louveau was published in 2015. By 2017, this paper was cited nearly 600 times, putting it in the 99th percentile for articles published that year.
His discovery of meningeal lymphatic vessels has attracted attention from many sources, and was touted as a scientific breakthrough in lists such as Scientific American's "Top 10 Science Stories of 2015", Science Magazine's "Breakthrough of the Year", Huffington Post's "Eight Fascinating Things We Learned About the Mind in 2015" and the National Institutes of Health's director Francis Collins year end review. Business Insider highlighted this as the biggest discovery ever made in Virginia.

Other discoveries

Other high-profile research has included the 2015 discovery that the immune system directly affects social behavior and that IFN-gamma is necessary for social development. This expands upon his work as a graduate student, when he discovered that mice lacking T-cells had cognitive impairments.
He is the senior author of a 2015 paper describing how CD4+ T-cells protect and repair neurons after injury to the spinal cord and brain.
A collaboration with Kodi Ravichandran characterized the generation of neurons in adult brains and the removal of dead neurons by phagocytic cells.
In 2016, he was the senior author on a paper identifying type 2 innate lymphocytes in the meninges near the lymphatic vessels his lab previously discovered. These cells have previously have been found in the gut, which suggests a link between the brain and the microbiome. In mice, these meningeal ILC2 cells were activated by IL-33 after spinal cord injury.

Grants and awards

His work has been funded by the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative, National Institutes of Health, the Hartwell Foundation, and the Cure Alzheimer's Fund. In 2018, he was awarded the NIH's prestigious Director's Pioneer Award and $5.6 million in additional research funding.
Kipnis is a Gutenberg Forschungskolleg Fellow and supervises a working group at the University of Mainz. He received the 2011 Robert Ader New Investigator Award from the Psychoneuroimmunology Research Society and the 2012 Jordi Folch-Pi award from the American Society for Neurochemistry. In 2016 he was a MIND Institute Distinguished Lecturer.

High impact papers