Patrick A. Baeuerle

Patrick Baeuerle (born 24 November 1957 in Friedrichshafen) is a German molecular biologist, Honorary Professor for Immunology at the University of Munich (LMU), and Chief Scientific Officer of the biopharmaceutical company Micromet, Inc. According to a survey of the Institute for Scientific Information, he was Germany’s most frequently cited biomedical researcher from 1991–2000, and ranked 38th worldwide. He has an h-index of 87 points.
Patrick Baeuerle did seminal work on tyrosine sulfation of proteins, transcription factor NF-kappaB, and on development of bi-specific T-cell engagers for therapy of cancer.

Patrick Baeuerle studied biology at the University of Konstanz, Germany. He did his Ph.D. work with Wieland B. Huttner at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Martinsried, Germany, and at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, and received his Ph.D. degree (summa cum laude) from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. His postdoctoral training was with Nobel laureate David Baltimore at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In 1989, Patrick Baeuerle started an independent research group at Klinikum Großhadern in Martinsried, Germany. In 1993, he became Chair of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the medical school of University of Freiburg. Three years later, he joined the start-up company Tularik in South San Francisco as its Director of Drug Discovery. In 1998, he moved back to Germany to head research and development of Micromet AG, a Munich-based biopharmaceutical company. By acquisition of CancerVax in 2006, Patrick Baeuerle became Chief Scientific Officer of NASDAQ -listed Micromet now headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, with a research centre in Munich, Germany.

As a student, Patrick Baeuerle showed that tyrosine sulfation is a trans-Golgi-specific modification of secretory proteins. As a postdoctoral fellow, he discovered the inhibitory subunit I-kappa B of transcription factor NF-kappa B, and became inventor of the controversial NF-kappa B patent ‘516. His own research group studied the function of purified I-kappaB proteins, supported cloning of NF-kappa B subunits p50 and p65/RelA, identified NF-kappa as a redox-controlled transcription factor demonstrated the trans-activating potential of p65/RelA, showed that NF-kappa B is binding to DNA as a heterodimer, studied how I-kappa B proteins control nuclear translocation of NF-kappaB, and unravelled the basic mechanism of NF-kappa B activation, involving phosphorylation of I-kappa B and its subsequent degradation by the proteasome. His group was also first to show that NF-kappa B plays a functional role in the nervous system. Patrick Baeuerle authored more than 150 publications on NF-kappa B and related research.

Since 1998, Patrick Baeuerle investigates the therapeutic potential of T cell-engaging BiTE antibodies for therapy of cancer, and has been responsible at Micromet for the development of blinatumomab and several other antibody therapies. He authored more than 210 publications (Search in PubMed with author name “baeuerle p”).