Opening Session

Frank Winkler 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. He studied medicine in Hamburg, Freiburg and London, specialised in neurology at the LMU Munich in Germany, spent a two-year postdoc at Harvard, and was appointed to Heidelberg in 2010.

The laboratory led by 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 tumour networks that are highly functional and resistant, driven by neurodevelopmental factors including pacemaker-like tumour cells in network hubs, and excitatory synapses between brain neurons and various incurable brain tumour entities that fuel brain tumour growth, invasion and metastasis.

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 tumours in humans.