Biography
Dr. Maximilian Konig is a rheumatologist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, MD and a postdoctoral fellow at the Ludwig Center for Cancer Genetics and Therapeutics & Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center. He received his medical degree from Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin and completed his residency training in internal medicine in the Stanbury Physician-Scientist Pathway at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, before pursuing a fellowship in rheumatology at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. He has a long-standing interest in mechanisms of disease initiation and propagation in autoimmune rheumatic and inflammatory disease. At the Ludwig Center at the Johns Hopkins University, he is part of an interdisciplinary team of physicians and scientists pursuing clinical trials to prevent the development of cytokine storm syndrome in COVID-19 by disrupting self-amplifying catecholamine-cytokine signaling pathways.

Talk
Preventing Death In COVID-19 Using Alpha-Blockers
Dysregulated immune responses are drivers of morbidity and mortality in COVID-19. Alpha-1-adrenergic receptor antagonists prevent death in animal models of hyperinflammation by disrupting the catecholamine-cytokine feed-forward loop and are associated with reduced mortality in patients with COVID-19 and severe pneumonia.