On September 6, 2018, Philippa Marrack, eleceted member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences visited Medical Research Institute and gave a guest lecture named "B Cell Heterogeneity" at Luojia Forum. Hongbing Shu, Vice President of Wuhan University as well as the director of MRI, presided over the forum and presented commemorative card for Marrack. Teachers as well as students from MRI, the College of Life Sciences, the School of Basic Medicine, and the affiliated hospitals actively participated in the forum.

Philippa Marrack gave a detailed introduction to the occurrence and development of autoimmune diseases. The content was highly praised by both teachers and students, they enthusiastically asked questions and conducted in-depth exchanges.

Philippa Marrack is a world-renowned immunology researcher whose groundbreaking work on T-cells has impacted the health of people across the world. Her findings shape medicine’s current understanding of the human immune system, vaccines, HIV, and other immune disorders.

For more than four decades together with her husband, John Kappler, she has, and continues to, unraveled the mysteries of the immune system; how it protects us from external threats when it is working and how it can lead to autoimmunity and allergies when it malfunctions. They identified and isolated the T-cell receptor, a primary sentinel for the immune response. They learned how the body makes and selects an effective array of T cells that recognize and attack potentially harmful foreign proteins while leaving the body's own tissues alone. They discovered superantigens, virulent toxins that cause an overwhelming and disastrous immune response that occurs in maladies such as toxic shock syndrome and food poisoning.