Ivan Điki receives Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine

The prize will be awarded to Đikić together with his cooperation partner Prof Brenda Schulman from the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried near Munich. This was announced today by the Swiss Louis-Jeantet Foundation. The Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine is one of the most prestigious awards for biomedical research and is endowed with 500,000 Swiss francs (approx. 500,000 euros).

For growth, metabolism and signal processing, body cells need thousands of proteins, which they have to produce and also break down again in orchestrated processes. Certain enzymes, so-called E3 ligases, attach small protein chains from ubiquitin units to defective, superfluous or harmful proteins. In this way, they signal to the proteasome, the shredder of the cell, that the respective proteins should be broken down into their components again. Professor Ivan Đikić has been researching this ubiquitin system for many years and is developing methods to be able to use it to fight diseases;                                  

Prof. Dr. Enrico Schleiff, President of Goethe University Frankfurt, congratulated the award winner: "With his pioneering work, Ivan Đikić has shown that ubiquitination not only controls degradation and self-renewal processes in the cell, but that there are different types of ubiquitin chains that together intervene in the regulation of almost all cellular functions. He has thus radically expanded our understanding of the ubiquitin system and revealed its relationship to diseases such as cancer or neurodegenerative disorders.“  

President Schleiff also emphasised the innovative application potential of Đikić's research work: „Ivan Đikić is a brilliant researcher. Among other things, he heads the future cluster Proxidrugs, which is breaking new ground in the development of medical agents based on the ubiquitin system. In this way, cancer-promoting proteins, for example, are to be targeted to the cellular degradation system, but this would only be one possible application. This opens the way to a completely new class of drugs, which can also be used to address the numerous disease-relevant proteins that have so far been inaccessible using classic small molecules. The development of such novel substance classes is also an important topic in our Emthera cluster initiative, which we launched together with Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and which is headed by Ivan Đikić together with last year's award winner Özlem Türeci."

Đikić said: „I am very proud to receive the Louise-Jeantet Prize for Medicine together with my colleague and friend Brenda Schulman. I am indebted to all the members of my lab, colleagues in Frankfurt, and collaborators around the world who have demonstrated that the culture of collaboration and data sharing is not only enjoyable, but also critical to the advancement of impactful scientific discovery. Our research has helped to position Frankfurt and Goethe University among the leading centres for biomedical research in Germany.

About the person
Ivan Đikić, born in 1966, studied medicine at the University of Zagreb and completed his doctorate at New York University. He founded his first independent group at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in Uppsala before being appointed Professor of Biochemistry at Goethe University Frankfurt. Since 2009, Đikić has been Director of the Institute of Biochemistry II here. From 2009 to 2013, he was also the founding director of the Buchmann Institute of Molecular Life Sciences. In 2018, Đikić was appointed Fellow of the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt. He is the spokesperson for the BMBF-funded PROXIDRUGS Cluster of Excellence, the DFG-funded Collaborative Research Centre 1177 on selective autophagy as well as co-spokesperson for the Enable cluster project and designated spokesperson for the planned Emthera Excellence Initiative. He was also recently awarded an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) for the third time. He has been honoured with numerous awards for his biomedical research, including the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize in 2013. He is an elected member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) and has also been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

About the prize
The Swiss Louis-Jeantet Foundation has awarded the Louis-Jeantet Prize every year since 1986 to scientists who have carried out outstanding research in the field of biomedicine. The prizewinners must be active in one of the member states of the Council of Europe. The Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine is endowed with 500,000 Swiss francs, of which 450,000 are intended for the continuation of the prizewinners' research and 50,000 for their personal use.

The award ceremony will take place on Wednesday, 26 April 2023, in Geneva, Switzerland. Further information can be found at: https://www.jeantet.ch/en/

An announcement by Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main dated 30 January 2023