Erich Wanker

Erich E. Wanker heads the laboratory of Proteomics and Molecular Mechanisms of Neurodegenerative Diseases at the Max Delbrück Center, Berlin (https://www.mdc-berlin.de/de/wanker). After his PhD at TU Graz, Austria and a postdoctoral stay at UCLA, USA, he started his own lab at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, Berlin, from where he was appointed chair of Molecular Medicine at Charité and Principal Investigator at Max Delbrück Center. He has made seminal contributions to the fields of Huntington’s disease, protein misfolding and aggregation, as well as interactomics. The main objective of his work is to understand the pathogenic mechanisms of neurodegenerative diseases. In particular, he aims to elucidate the molecular principles of protein misfolding in neurodegeneration and the mechanisms by which abnormally folded proteins, their complexes and aggregates cause dysfunction and cellular toxicity. To promote translation of basic research into benefits for patients, his lab identifies and characterizes modulators of protein misfolding cascades in disease and investigates principles of seeding and spreading of misfolded proteins in vitro and ex vivo. In addition, the group develop interactomics approaches, also mainly applied to neurodegenerative disease processes. Previously, they generated a focused protein-protein interaction network for huntingtin, a large map of the human proteome, and a comprehensive interaction map of proteins relevant to neurodegeneration. Combining in-cell two-hybrid with mass spec approaches, they recently put forward an interaction map advancing our understanding of mutant huntingtin-dependent dysfunction in cortico-striatal cellular networks. Their latest investigations, using AI among other approaches, show huntingtin aggregation, transcriptional dysregulation and survival of flies transgenic for Huntington’s disease to be linked. Erich has coordinated and contributed to various national and international collaborative research efforts and has published over 190 peer-reviewed articles.