German Cancer Research Center
Heidelberg, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany
Professor Frank Winkler is a managing senior physician in the Department of Neurology at the University of Heidelberg and group leader at the German Cancer Research Center. He studied medicine in Hamburg, Freiburg and London, specialized in Neurology at the LMU Munich, spent a 2 year postdoc in Boston, and was appointed to Heidelberg in 2010. Dr Winklers’ work has been published in Nature, Cell, Nature Medicine, Cancer Cell (among others) and he is involved in >25 phase 1-3 clinical trials. In 2022 he received the German Cancer Award (category translational).
Interested in cellular and molecular mechanisms of brain tumor progression, Dr. Winkler has done pioneering work in the field of Cancer Neuroscience. By discovering cancer-intrinsic neural mechanisms and also neuro-cancer synapses, novel concepts of incurable brain tumor types like glioblastoma and brain metastases have been developed. Based on these discoveries, he has launched investigator-initiated trial concepts where drugs that inhibit those neuro-cancer networks are tested.
