Professor Dr Patrick A. Baeuerle

Research Priorities: Development of cancer drugs, tumour immunology, cell biology, protein engineering, therapeutic antibodies
Patrick Alexander Baeuerle is a biologist and carries out research in the field of applied immunology. His focus is the development of immune-based cancer drugs. He has worked on the development of novel cancer therapies based on antibodies, fusion proteins, cytokines and gene-modified immune cells for over 20 years. This work has led to the worldwide approval of the leukaemia drug Blincyto and the foundation of so far seven biotech companies in the USA and one in Germany, currently with more than ten clinical programmes testing novel therapies for cancer patients.
Blincyto is known as a bispecific antibody, which briefly links the T immune cells of cancer patients with cancer cells and thus initiates their elimination. A common feature of all cancer therapies developed by Patrick Baeuerle is that they activate the immune cells of patients against cancer cells, using novel proteins tailor-made for this purpose with recombinant methods.
Baeuerle’s initial research focused on relaying pathogenic signals from the cell membrane into the cell nucleus. The inducible transcription factor NF-kappaB plays a key role here. The latter is activated by various pathogenic stimuli in many diseases and initiates the expression of defence genes and immune signalling proteins. His research has led to the discovery of new subunits of NF-kappaB (I-kappaB and p65/RelA) and has explained the canonical activation mechanism of NF-kappaB, which is based on the degradation of the inhibitory subunit I-kappaB by the ubiquitin system.
Since 1998 Patrick Baeuerle has developed novel cancer drugs, primarily in biotech companies in the USA. As Head of Research at Micromet, he was responsible for developing the bispecific antibody blinatumomab, which was approved in the USA in 2014 and in Europe in 2015 as the leukaemia treatment “Blincyto”. Blinatumomab is not only the first, but until recently was also the only approved antibody of its kind able to eliminate the patient’s cancer cells by using their T immune cells. Numerous other cancer drugs that Baeuerle has helped to develop are currently undergoing clinical trials. For example, T cells that have been genetically modified with a synthetic TRuC receptor are currently being tested in mesothelioma patients. For patients with other cancers the next generation of bispecific antibodies is being developed which are only activated after penetrating into the tumour. Preclinical research includes work on novel cytokine fusion proteins that link interleukins-2 and -12. Many cancer therapies have been co-developed by Patrick Baeuerle and promise to have both improved tolerability and increased efficacy.