Researcher of the Year 2023 - Karl Sotlar
Karl Sotlar, MD, is Professor of Pathology and Head of the Institute of Pathology, University Hospital Salzburg, Paracelsus Medical University, Salzburg, Austria. He has completed his medical degree at the Medical School, Heinrich-Heine-University, Düsseldorf, Germany. For a residency training in Pathology and Molecular Pathology he moved to the Institute of Pathology, Eberhard-Karls-University, Tübingen, Germany where he also habilitated. In 2007, he was appointed Professor of Hematopathology at the Institute of Pathology, Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich, combined with the position of the Senior Physician and Deputy Director of the Institute.
Dr. Sotlar´s focus in research are molecular mechanisms in solid and hematological neoplasms, e.g. breast cancer, cervical cancer, and, especially, mastocytosis. There he focused on the identification of diagnostic and prognostic immunohistochemical biomarkers and the establishment of molecular methods in the diagnosis of systemic mastocytosis and associated hematologic neoplasms.
Karl Sotlar is author and coauthor of more than 230 research and review articles in various prestigious journals, including Blood, Haematologica, Journal of Clinical Oncology, Nature, American Journal of Pathology, Journal of Pathology, Modern Pathology, etc. Major contributions arising from these studies include the morphological and molecular identification of neoplastic mast cells in mastocytosis and its mimics. In 2005 he received the Rudolf Virchow Prize of the German Society for Pathology for his work. Some of the immunohistochemically identified and validated biomarkers (CD25, CD30) today represent minor diagnostic criteria for systemic mastocytosis. By the detection of the KIT D816V mutation in microdissected neoplastic myelomonocytic cells in a patient with SM-CMML his molecular studies had major impacts for the understanding of the clonal relationship of the two disease components in SM-AHN.
Dr. Sotlar participated at the year 2000 Vienna Working Conference which resulted in the first generally accepted WHO classification of mastocytosis and he is one of the founding members of the ECNM. He has organized the ECNM meetings in Munich 2015 and in Salzburg 2019. Karl Sotlar is the Coauthor of the 2022 WHO classification of mastocytosis.
For his ´Pioneering Work in the Field of Mastocytosis´ Prof. Sotlar received the Researcher of the Year (ROY) award in 2023.