Prof. Dr. Matthias Gehringer appointed as W3 Professor for Medicinal Chemistry

Exciting news for our Cluster and the Medical Faculty of the Eberhard Karls University Tübingen! Matthias Gehringer has been appointed as W3-Professor for Medicinal Chemistry with a focus on protein kinase inhibitors! Congratulations to this well-deserved achievement! Matthias has been on board from day one (2019) as Junior Professor and Associate Investigator.

Matthias Gehringer (born 1984) studied chemistry at the Universities of Karlsruhe and Heidelberg and at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Chimie in Montpellier (France). In 2014, he received his doctorate summa cum laude in pharmaceutical/medical chemistry under Prof. Dr. Stefan Laufer at the Pharmaceutical Institute of the University of Tübingen. As a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Prof. Dr. Karl-Heinz Altmann at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich (Switzerland), he worked for two years in natural product total synthesis. He focused on synthetic derivatives of the so-called mycolactones, which cause a neglected disease called Buruli ulcer. His aim was to decipher the mechanism of action of these compounds and to develop new methods for diagnostics and therapy. He then returned to Tübingen to set up his own research group. Since 2019, he has been Junior Professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the Pharmaceutical Institute of the University of Tübingen and Associate Investigator in the Cluster of Excellence iFIT (Image-Guided and Functionally Instructed Tumor Therapies), the only oncology Cluster of Excellence in Germany.

Prof. Gehringer's research focuses on inhibitors of protein kinases, a class of enzymes whose deregulation can lead to a wide variety of diseases, particularly cancer. The enormous therapeutic relevance of these target proteins is impressively demonstrated by the market approval of over 80 protein kinase inhibitors in the last 23 years, the vast majority of which are used in oncological indications. Prof. Gehringer's research group is mainly working on so-called covalent inhibitors, which achieve increased efficacy, a longer duration of action and often also increased selectivity by forming a chemical bond to the target protein.

Prof. Gehringer's work has been recognized with various awards, including the 2021 Host-Böhme Young Scientist Award from the German Pharmaceutical Society (DPhG) and most recently the 2024 Portoghese Lectureship Award from the American Chemical Society (ACS) Division of Medicinal Chemistry (MEDI).

Again, congrats Matthias on this great achievement!