From small molecules to sequences: prepare for a new discovery landscape

Matthias studied chemistry at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT; Germany), the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Chimie de Montpellier (ENSCM; France), and the University of Heidelberg (Germany). He obtained his doctorate from the University of Tübingen (Germany) where he worked in the group of Prof. Stefan Laufer on reversible and irreversible inhibitors of the protein kinase JAK3. As a postdoc at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zürich (with Prof. Karl-Heinz Altmann), he focused on the total synthesis of complex natural products from the mycolactone family. In 2019, he was appointed as Assistant Professor for Medicinal Chemistry at the Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Tübingen. In May 2024, he was appointed as Full Professor and head of the Division for Medicinal Chemistry at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering of the Faculty of Medicine, University of Tübingen. Matthias is a Principal Investigator (PI) in the Cluster of Excellence "Image Guided and Functionally Instructed Tumor Therapies (iFIT)".

His research focuses primarily on covalent protein kinase inhibitors and novel approaches for the covalent targeting of cysteine and other amino acids. He received a variety of awards including the Young Investigator Award of the German Pharmaceutical Society and recently the Phil Portoghese Lectureship Award of the American Chemical Society MEDI division. Notably, Matthias is currently heading a European Federation for Medicinal Chemistry and Chemical Biology (EFMC) Best Practices initiative on covalent drug modalities. 

Photo: ©Universitätsklinikum Tübingen / Beate Armbruster