Andreas Plückthun
Universität of Zürich
Andreas Plückthun is currently a Full Professor of biochemistry at the University of Zürich, Switzerland. He was born in Heidelberg, Germany and studied chemistry at the University of Heidelberg. He received his graduate education at the University of California at San Diego, where he obtained a Ph.D. in 1982. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Chemistry Department of Harvard University (1982-85). From 1985 until 1993, he was group leader at the Genzentrum and Max-Planck-Institut für Biochemie in Martinsried. He was appointed to the faculty of the University of Zürich as a Full Professor of Biochemistry in 1993. He has written about 300 publications, which have been cited over 12,000 times.
He received the Young Investigator's Award of the German Industry Fund, was elected member of EMBO, and is recipient of the Karl-Heinz-Beckurts-Prize for 2000 (Munich, Germany), a finalist in the World Technology Awards 2001 (London, UK) and recipient of the JP Morgan Chase Health Award in 2002 (San Jose, USA) and the Wilhelm Exner Medal 2002 (Vienna, Austria), and together with his team, the Swiss Technology Award 2005 (Bern, Switzerland) and the deVigier Award in 2005. In 2003, he was elected to the German Academy of Natural Scientists (Leopoldina). He is co-founder and Scientific Advisor of Morphosys AG (Martinsried, Germany) and of Molecular Partners AG (Zürich, Switzerland), for which he is also a board member.
His research combines the development of selection technologies with detailed biophysical investigations, to create proteins of superior properties. This has included synthetic antibodies and different repeat proteins, ultimately for therapy, as well the evolution of membrane proteins such as GPCRs for stability and expression to obtain a higher success rate in structural studies.