Marc Donath is Head of the Clinic for Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism at the University Hospital of Basel. He has made numerous contributions to our understanding of the pathogenesis of type 2 diabetes, his most important being the identification of an inflammatory process underlying failure of insulin production in this disease. Thereby he showed that metabolic stress induces an IL-1β mediated immune response. His work has contributed to the concept of immunometabolism.