In the 40th Annual Meeting of the German Society for Immunology (DGFI) on September 22-5, 2010, Avery-Landsteiner Prize was awarded to Professor Shizuo Akira, Director of IFReC.

Professor Akira is the third Japanese to be awarded the prize. The first and the second Japanese winners are Dr. Susumu Tonegawa (RIKEN, Nobel laureate of 1987) and Prof. Tadamitsu Kishimoto (the former president of Osaka University), respectively.