About FOCIS

The mission of the Federation of Clinical Immunology Societies (FOCIS) is to apply the science of immunology to improve human health through interdisciplinary research, education, communication, and collaboration.

The Federation of Clinical Immunology Societies is a key forum where opinion leaders come together to chart the path to the next major breakthrough in disease therapy.

Through FOCIS, researchers and clinicians share knowledge across traditional disease borders, and identify commonalities between treatments and therapies that are life-changing for those impacted by immune-mediated diseases.

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Jeff Bluestone, PhD

FOCIS Past President, 2018-2020

Chief Executive Officer and President, Sonoma Biotherapeutics

FOCIS is the home for translational immunology — a place for immunologists across the translational and disciplinary spectrum to find access to a community of scientists, a community of clinicians, and a community of scholars who have broad interest in the field.

-Jeff Bluestone, PhD

Initially established as a cross-disciplinary meeting, FOCIS held its first Annual Meeting in 2001. After two successful consecutive meetings, FOCIS incorporated as a 501(c)3 organization in 2003. Today, FOCIS has 66 Member Societies, representing roughly 65,000 clinician scientists.

66

Member Societies

65,000

Clinician Scientists Represented

80

FOCIS Centers of Excellence

I co-founded FOCIS because of the need in the medical community to understand the breadth of human inflammatory disease. As a neurologist specializing in multiple sclerosis, it is necessary to understand new developments in other autoimmune diseases and in the basic immunology of autoimmunity, or you will be left behind.

-David Hafler, MD, FANA

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David Hafler, MD, FANA

Chair, Department of Neurology, Yale University

Neurologist-in-Chief, Yale New Haven Hospital

The FOCIS Annual Meeting and FOCISed courses educate clinicians, researchers, and trainees in the broad discipline of clinical immunology. FOCIS is the world’s leader in immunology education and in training future generations of clinical immunologists.

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C. Garrison Fathman, MD

Professor of Medicine (Immunology and Rheumatology), Emeritus, Stanford University

I co-founded FOCIS because there was no focus for clinical immunology. The clear association among autoimmune disorders was lost in the organ-centric societies that had evolved.

A rheumatologist by training, I found the ability of one class of drugs (TNF inhibitors) to treat several diseases across several subspecialties a driving force that underscored the need for a society or federation that would look across diseases (a horizontal look) rather than focus in depth on one disease because of its organ specific nature (a vertical look).

– C. Garrison Fathman, MD