Falling Walls Falling Walls Science Summit 2023

Breaking the Wall to Next Generation Biopharmaceuticals

Christian Hackenberger

Life Sciences Science Breakthrough of the Year

The nominating institution FMP on the breakthrough:

Christian Hackenberger has pioneered contributions to the development of protein-based therapeutics, based on the chemical modification and cellular delivery of antibodies to target cancer and viral infections. Highlights include the engineering of an inhibitor against human and avian influenza, and safer next-gen antibody drug conjugates, which outperformed a clinically approved drug against Hodgkin lymphoma.

Tags: Med-Tech, COVID-19, Education, Bio-Tech

Christian Hackenberger

Leibniz-Forschungsinstitut für Molekulare Pharmakologie

Christian P. R. Hackenberger studied chemistry at the Universität Freiburg and the UW Madison/Wisconson and performed his doctoral studies at the RTWH Aachen. After a postdoctoral stay at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he founded his own research group at the Freie Universität Berlin in 2005 as an Emmy Noether fellow. In 2012, he became Leibniz-Humboldt Professor for Chemical Biology at the Leibniz-Research Institute for Molecular Pharmacology and the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. 

His group develops chemical strategies to functionalize proteins and antibodies using highly selective chemical reactions to generate protein-based therapeutics against cancer, Alzheimer and viral infections. He is a co-founder of the Munich-based company Tubulis, which engineers better tolerable cancer drugs using technologies from his lab. In 2020, Christian was the first recipient of the Falling Walls breakthrough award in the Life Sciences, recognizing his contributions to develop next-generation biopharmaceuticals.

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