Elmar Jaeckel is a trained gastroenterologist/hepatologist as well as endocrinologist/diabetologist and transplantation specialist. He is Medical Director of the Liver Transplant Program at the Ajmera Transplant Centre, University Health Network. Since 2003, he has been leading the research group on immune tolerance and metabolic inflammation at the Hanover Medical School. The group is focusing to establish tissue-specific tolerance in autoimmunity, transplantation and metabolic inflammation.

His working group, Immune Tolerance, aims in establishing immune tolerance in type 1 diabetes and after biological beta cell replacement. For this purpose, he is developing new cell and gene therapy approaches. He is involved in pursuing islet xenotransplantation in Germany and to facilitate tolerance to stem cell derived beta cells. One major research focus is the change of specificity of regulatory T cells for beta cells by the use of chimeric antigen-receptors (CARs). In addition, he aims in local control of immune responses in metabolic inflammation in NASH patients.

He has published numerous articles on viral hepatitis, autoimmune liver disease, autoimmune diabetes and islet transplantation tolerance. He developed tissue-specific regulatory T cell therapies for local tolerance induction, which are currently being tested in clinical trials. He has numerous patents on tolerance inducing therapies and is co-founder of Quell Therapeutics aiming to develop clinical therapies for tolerance induction with regulatory T cells.