Hans Lehrach's Biography

Hans Lehrach, Head/Professor/Director, Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics

Hans Lehrach, Ph.D., is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin since 1994. His expertise lies in genetics, genomics, systems biology and personalized medicine.
Highlights include his key involvement in several large-scale genome sequencing projects, such as the human, rat, and Schizosaccharomyces. His group was part of the team which identified the Huntington’s disease gene. Dr. Lehrach also performed key work on technologies such as protein microarrays, protein interactome analysis, yeast artificial chromosomes and RNAseq. He has been pioneer in the application of next generation sequencing techniques and systems medicine for the development of personalized therapies in cancer (Virtual Patient Model). He is partner in two German ICGC projects and partner in the European IHEC project BLUEPRINT, he is a steering committee member of the 1000 Genomes project, leader of the managing entity of the IMI OncoTrack project and co-ordinated the FET Flagship pilot initiative IT Future of Medicine (ITFoM).
For his work, Dr. Lehrach has received several awards such as the Ján Jessenius SAS Medal of Honour for outstanding achievements in medical sciences of the Slovak Academy of Sciences and the Karl Heinz Beckurts Award for achievements in genome research.
Dr. Lehrach has co-founded several biotechnology companies such as Sequana Therapeutics, GPC Biotech, Scienion, Prot@gen, PSF Biotech, Atlas Biolabs, Alacris Theranostics. In 2010 he founded the non-for-profit research institute The Dahlem Centre for Genome Research and Medical Systems Biology (DCGMSB).