Richard Willstätter Prize for Chemical Biology awarded for the first time

Herbert Waldmann has been awarded the Richard Willstätter Prize for his outstanding contributions in the field of chemical biology

January 28, 2021

Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Herbert Waldmann, Director of the Department of Chemical Biology at the Max Planck Institute of molecular Physiology (MPI) in Dortmund, has received the Richard Willstätter Prize at the “Advances in Chemical Biology” conference. The prize endowed with 6.000 EUR was awarded for the first time and honors his extraordinary achievements in the research field of chemical biology. In many areas he has pushed the boundaries of this interdisciplinary research and thus contributed significantly to a better understanding of chemical-biological processes.

Prof. Waldmann recognized early on the interdisciplinarity of chemistry and biology as an emerging and fruitful research field. He has set new standards in the fields of lipidated proteins, biology-oriented synthesis, solid-phase methods, drug and protein microarrays, and most recently in the development of so-called pseudo-natural products. In this novel approach, different natural substances are first reduced to their fragments which are then combined with each other in unprecedented ways. By this means, it was possible to develop completely new active substances that can, for example, stop the uptake of glucose in cancer cells.

Since his appointment as Director at the MPI of Molecular Physiology and as Chair of Organic Chemistry at the TU Dortmund in 1999, Waldmann has contributed significantly to the development of Dortmund as an internationally renowned centre for chemical biology. He is the initiator of the Chemical Genomics Centre founded in 2005 in Dortmund, which the Max Planck Society runs together with research-driven pharmaceutical companies. As an author, Herbert Waldmann has published so far over 500 articles in renowned scientific journals. For his work in the field of chemical biology, he has been awarded numerous prizes and honors, such as the Otto Bayer Prize, the Emil Fischer Medal of the German Chemical Society (GDCh) and an Honorary Doctorate from Leiden University in the Netherlands.

The Richard Willstätter Prize for Chemical Biology

The Richard Willstätter Prize for Chemical Biology honors interdisciplinary research, gaining knowledge of chemical-biological interrelations, and outstanding commitment to the discipline, e.g. in the form of supporting young scientists or the organization of degree programs. The Richard Willstätter Prize for Chemical Biology is awarded by the DECHEMA Gesellschaft für Chemische Technik und Biotechnologie e.V. , the Deutschen Pharmazeutischen Gesellschaft e.V. (DPhG), the Gesellschaft für Biochemie und Molekularbiologie e.V. (GBM) and the Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker e.V. (GDCh) in equal shares.