Research

Rupert Handgretinger studied Medicine from 1979 to 1985 at the universities Essen , Munich and Tuebingen. He received his medical degree in 1989 and venia legendi 1996 from the Eberhard-Karls-University in Tübingen, where he completed his training in Pediatrics and Hematology/Oncology. From 2000–2005, he was the director of the Division of Stem Cell Transplantation at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, USA, where he served as a full faculty member and Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Tennessee, Memphis. Since 2005, he is the chairman of the Department of General Pediatrics and Hematology/Oncology at the Children’s University. In 2010, he was also appointed as the medical director of the Children’s University Hospital. In 2011, he received the Landesforschungspreis Baden-Württemberg and in 2014 the Robert Pfleger-Forschungspreis.

His main research interests have been cellular immunotherapeutic approaches to the treatment of children with various forms of cancer in the context of allogeneic stem cell transplantation. He contributed to the establishment of graft engineering techniques to introduce new concepts in haploidentical transplantation and to the elucidation of mechanisms of graft-mediated anti-tumor effects. The haploidentical transplant program at the Children’s University Hospital in Tübingen is dedicated to the further improvement of haploidentical transplantation for various malignant diseases and to develop post-transplant immunotherapeutic strategies to prevent relapses.