Hackenberger, Christian

Christian Hackenberger studied chemistry in Freiburg, Madison and Aachen. After a postdoc at MIT, he started his group at FU 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 HU Berlin. His group develops chemical strategies to functionalize proteins and antibodies to generate protein-based pharmaceuticals against cancer, Alzheimer and viral infections. He is a co-founder of Tubulis, which engineers better tolerable cancer drugs using technologies from his lab.

Abstract:

The power of chemoselectivity: Functional protein-conjugates for intra- and extracellular targeting

Topic:

In this presentation, l will focus on the chemical modification of functional proteins for for pharmaceutical and medicinal applications.¹ In my laboratory, we use a combined approach of recently developed chemoselective reactions and enzymatic ligations, for instance the so-called P5-² or Tub-tag³-labeling, for bioconjugation.

By generating stable antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs),^2b structurally defined multivalent scaffolds⁴ or cell-permeable antibodies via conjugating cyclic cell-penetrating peptides,⁵ we provide new modalities for most challenging pharmaceutical targets, including next generation cancer therapeutics or novel inhibitors against viral infections.