Frank Winkler PhD

Frank Winkler studied medicine in Hamburg, Freiburg, and London, specialized in neurology at the LMU Munich in Germany, spent a 2-year postdoc at Harvard, and was appointed to Heidelberg in 2010. He is Professor for Neuro-Oncology at Heidelberg University’s Faculty of Medicine and also Managing Senior Physician in the Department of Neurology. His research group, Experimental Neurooncology, is located in the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg.

The laboratory led by Frank Winkler employed neuroscientific methods to develop a fundamentally new understanding of the most malignant brain tumours in adults, glioblastomas and brain metastases. Key discoveries of this work have helped to establish the new research field of Cancer Neuroscience. Those include malignant multicellular tumor networks that are highly functional and resistant, driven by neurodevelopmental factors, including pacemaker-like tumor cells in network hubs, and excitatory synapses between brain neurons and various incurable brain tumor entities that fuel brain tumor growth, invasion, and metastasis.

Frank Winkler translates his pioneering work in Cancer Neuroscience into novel, neuroscience-instructed cancer therapies. He has initiated clinical trials that investigate how disconnection of neuro-cancer networks can better control brain tumors in humans.