Welcome to the J Project website!

Foreword

The field of primary immunodeficiencies (PID) was just revving up when I entered it in the eighties. This branch of medical sciences has gone through intense development over the past decades by creating new concepts and providing explanation for the molecular genetic basis of more than 450 inborn errors of immunity (Tangye et al, JoCI, 2021). We have learned that infections result from specific human germline genetic variability which paved the way of the genetic theory of infectious diseases. However, the new knowledge was not rapidly and evenly spread in the medical community. I still recall the shocking data from the European Society for Immunodeficiencies (ESID) registry presented by Lennart Hammarström in Debrecen, August 2002, and showing that the number of registered PID patients was less than 10 in many countries of Eastern and Central Europe (ECE).
Thus, the J Project physician education and clinical research collaboration program was to improve diagnosis and care of PID patients in ECE. The J Project has spread and reached milestone successes in terms of the number of diagnosed and treated patients and at a later stage, establishing genetic centers for mutational analysis in Debrecen, Hungary and various ECE countries and organizing the J Daughters Project network in 2009. These successes could only be achieved with the outstanding ambition and remarkable contribution by leaders of the colleagues from ECE, as well as from leaders of the J Daughters projects in Siberia and Far East Russia, Central Asia, Turkey, Iran, and Egypt. The Project has been generously supported by the Jeffrey Modell Foundation, and several pharmaceutical companies provided educational grants. All activities are coordinated and supported by the Foundation for Children with Immunodeficiencies since 2014. I am grateful to all our sponsors and judge myself fortunate to have caught the primary immunodeficiency wave in the past decades.