I came across your valuable resource, doing a search to prepare for a class I am giving on immune regulation this week. I really appreciate the effort you have put into it and easily found the information I was looking for (from a letter to COPE, November 2014; cited with permission; Steven K. Lundy, Ph.D., Internal Medicine-Rheumatology, University of Michigan Medical School)
... suffice to say that, had it not been for the open availability of your resource back in '08, I may well have failed to put together all the many, many pieces in a very puzzling patient I was evaluating, eventually making a diagnosis that has come to be the focus of my career and has given me a new ability to substantially help many chronically multi-systemically ill patients. In any event, thank you for your abysmally underappreciated labor of obvious love. I hope to be able to contribute more in the future, as I feel that I owe you much more than my academician's bank balance presently permits me to express. I hope you take at least some comfort and joy in knowing you have played a key role in making a huge difference in the lives of many seriously ill patients. I have two main points regarding COPE and its usefulness and impact. First, all information is in one place and hyperlinked more extensively than you'll find on just about any other website I've ever seen, making it trivial to very quickly discover lots more about any subject mentioned anywhere on any COPE page. This truly is "value-added information," a shining example of what Tim Berners-Lee intended when he invented the web. Secondly, it was COPE's entry on mast cells that helped me see that the normal biology of these cells is so much more complex than what I had been taught in medical school or what I could glean even from the most comprehensive reviews of mast cell biology and disease. Some links in particular, leading from mast cells to other COPE entries, gave me a Eureka moment. Eventually, the insights gained from this value-added-information contributed substantially to my being able to correctly diagnose and effectively treat the newly recognized "mast cell activation syndrome" (MCAS) in large numbers of previously mysteriously chronically ill patients despite their confounding great heterogeneity. Thus, it cannot be denied that COPE has helped make hundreds of patients' lives better (from a letter to COPE, October 2014; cited with permission; Lawrence Afrin, MD, University of Minnesota Medical School, USA)
being a clinical assessor at the Paul-Ehrlich-Institute in Germany, which is part of the Federal Agency that authorizes blood and serum products, I frequently have to assess the possible effects of release of certain cytokines - so I find your site extremely helpful (from a letter to COPE, January 2015; cited with permission; Dr Jacqueline Kerr, Paul-Ehrlich-Institut (Federal Institute for Vaccines and Biomedicines), an Agency of the German Federal Ministry of Health, Langen, Germany)
(from a letter to COPE, January 2015; cited with permission; Prof. Dr. Waldemar Kolanus, Molecular Immune and Cell Biology, Laboratory of Molecular Immunology Life and Medical Sciences Institute (LIMES), University of Bonn, Germany)
During my career in neuroimmunology, the COPE Encyclopaedia always was and still is a great help. In a field where googols of interactions between cells, proteins, and other molecules need to be considered, one can easily get lost and despair of the overwhelming amount of - often inconsistent - literature. COPE structures information, boils it down and interlinks it with other relevant entries. Colleagues of mine from neuroscience or psychology who are new to the field of immunology find great help in COPE since it also helps to manage an often inconsistent and confusing terminology. I am currently not aware of any comparably reliable and comprehensive source of encyclopedic data on immunology available to the public. Therefore, COPE is my first recommendation for everyone interested in immunologic or neuroimmunologic research (from a letter to COPE, October 2014; cited with permission; Dr Jan-Sebastian Grigoleit, Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla)
"As clinical oncologists, we recognize that our daily business is based not only on 'poisoning' or 'irradiating' malignant cells, but mainly on interfering with cellular communication processes. Almost every milestone in cancer medicine of the past few years is based on our understanding of cell signalling and strategies aimed at modulating these processes. Whenever dealing with this extremely complex matter, I am extremely glad to use COPE as a profound and well-structured guidance." (from a letter to COPE, September 2014; cited with permission; Dr Andreas Thomsen, University Clinic, Freiburg, Germany)
"COPE is a wonderful resource, really. It helps saving hours of my time searching for information that otherwise would be scattered across the web in various papers and databases. You have done a great job and dedicated tremendous amounts of efforts to make these data accessible to anyone - I cannot thank you enough for that. I work in the field of cancer immunotherapy - we deal with immune cells and cytokines on an every day basis - and whenever I google something important for my projects, COPE pops up on the first page almost every time. I use it more often than PubMed now!" (from a letter to COPE, May 2014; cited with permission; Max Mamonkin, Baylor College of Medicine, USA)
"Interestingly, the more I researched haematopoiesis and leukaemia the more I got to appreciate your collection of information; from a basic way to now using it as a platform to gather high quality insights for my experiments and understanding of the field" (from a letter to COPE, February 2014; cited with permission; Julius Blaser, Vienna Biocenter, Austria)
from any infinite dollar printing government-backed proprietary journal in the world (from a letter to COPE, January 2015; cited with permission; John Schloendorn, Germany).
"...your online encyclopedia of cytokine biology is a tremendous achievement in compilation and distillation of complex information. You cover an extraordinarily broad array of topics, truly reflecting the interdisciplinary nature and complexity of cytokine biology. Some of your subdictionaries would easily pass as stand-alone dictionaries in their own right. I am not aware that the field has been covered so extensively anywhere else. Your work is exceptionally useful for everyone professionally dealing with cytokines, cellular receptors, and mechanistic biology. You have made a great contribution to cytokine biology and also to bioinformatics in gathering, consolidating, presenting biological information and in putting things into perspective. Thanks for your outstanding contribution to the field of cytokine biology." (cited by permission from a letter to COPE received 2006; Jeffrey A. Bluestone, Director, UCSF Diabetes Center and Director, Immune Tolerance Network, USA)
" .... quite informative and educational. .... a worthwhile and Herculean endeavor." (cited by permission from a letter to COPE received 2006; Joost J. Oppenheim, Chief of LMI, NCI-FCRF, NIH, USA)
"... just wanted to let you know how valuable your website is to those investigators in the field of cytokine research. It is clearly one of the most comprehensive sites available to scientists worldwide. ... COPE is an all important resource." (cited by permission from a letter to COPE received 2006; Howard A. Young, Past President of the International Society of Interferon and Cytokine Research; NIH, USA)
"COPE is a goldmine when it comes to terminology, scientific concepts of communication biology, new developments, and all the manifold cross-connections in this multidisciplinary discipline." (cited by permission from a letter to COPE received 2006; Matthias von Herrath, Member-Professor, Head, Immune Regulation Lab at the La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology, USA)