Ralf Bartenschlager

Prof. BARTENSCHLAGER studied Biology at Heidelberg University, Germany. After his diploma work (1987) and PhD thesis (1990) at the Center of Molecular Biology (ZMBH) in Heidelberg, Germany, he went as a Postdoctoral fellow to Hoffmann-La Roche AG, Basel, Switzerland, where he started to work on hepatitis C virus (HCV). Back to Germany he made his “Habilitation” in Virology at the University of Mainz, Germany in 1999 and worked there as independent research group leader. In May 2002 he accepted the Chica and Heinz Schaller Foundation awarded professorship “Molecular Virology” at Heidelberg University and in 2014 a position at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), where he is head of the research unit “Virus-associated Carcinogenesis” and speaker of the research program “Infection, Inflammation and Cancer”. His main research focus is on the biology of flaviviruses, SARS-CoV-2 virus and hepatitis viruses, especially hepatitis C and B virus. He succeeded in developing cell culture models for the hepatitis C virus, which laid the ground for the development of antiviral drugs that eliminate the virus in more than 95% of treated patients. Today, his main research interest is the complex interplay between these viruses and their host cells. This includes studies on molecular and cellular mechanisms leading to persistent infection and how to break it, how chronic viral hepatitis contributes to liver cancer and how oncogenic viruses develop from an evolutionary point of view. This also includes how RNA-viruses re-programme intracellular membranes to construct their own replication organelles. Ralf Bartenschlager has been awarded the Lasker DeBakey Award for clinical medical research and the Robert Koch Prize, amongst others. Since 2016 he is speaker of the Collaborative Research Center “Determinants and dynamics of elimination versus persistence of hepatitis virus infection” and since 2020 president of the Society of Virology.