Award Frank Winkler Receives World’s Largest Prize for Brain Research
5 March 2025
The neuroscientist and neurologist has been selected for Danish Lundbeck Foundation’s Brain Prize 2025
Neuroscientist and neurologist Prof. Dr Frank Winkler is to receive the world’s largest prize in the area of brain research − the Brain Prize 2025 granted by the Lundbeck Foundation – as the foundation announced on Wednesday (5 March). The award honors his research on the interaction of brain tumor cells and the nervous system, which laid the foundations for cancer neuroscience as a research field and provides starting points for new therapeutic strategies with glioblastomas – malignant brain tumors. Frank Winkler does his research at the Medical Faculty Heidelberg of Heidelberg University and at the German Cancer Research Center; he is active as a physician at Heidelberg University Hospital. The award is worth ten million Danish crowns (approximately 1.3 million euros) and goes in equal parts to the Heidelberg scientist and a colleague in the United States. The award ceremony with King Frederik X of Denmark will take place in Copenhagen.
Prof. Dr Frauke Melchior, Rector of Heidelberg University, underlines: “The groundbreaking studies by Frank Winkler connect in outstanding fashion patient-related research and clinical practice. This close interaction, so essential for successes in the health sector, is particularly fostered in our Innovation Campus, the Health + Life Science Alliance Heidelberg Mannheim. Members of the university, university hospitals and non-university institutions collaborate closely in the alliance, in order – in the nexus between research, hospital and medical technology – to introduce new scientific findings into medical care as rapidly as possible. Our warmest congratulations go to Frank Winkler on receiving this prestigious award.”
Prof. Winkler’s research findings offer fundamentally new insights into the growth of so far incurable glioblastoma – extremely aggressive brain tumors. The tumor cells enter into contact with healthy nerve cells and receive signals from them; this fuels the invasive growth of the tumors. In addition, some tumor cells develop into “activators”, which, together with the excitation signals from the nerve cells, drive the formation of a tumor network like a fungal tangle in the brain. “The network enables the tumor cells to engage in complex communication and gives them enormous resistance to the usual therapies,” says Prof. Winkler. The functional understanding of these cell-to-cell contacts is now opening up approaches to entirely new therapeutic strategies, which are currently being tested in clinical studies.
The Heidelberg scientist shares the award with Prof. Dr Michelle Monje, whose research as a neuroscientist and neurooncologist at Stanford University (USA) focuses on inoperable brain tumors in children. According to the Lundbeck Foundation, Prof. Winkler and Prof. Monje discovered the intensive interaction between glioma cells and neural cells in the brain independently of one another, fundamentally changing the understanding of the biology of these neurological types of cancer. The Foundation here perceives a “paradigm shift” in that the two researchers have related the neurosciences to cancer research.
“The research area of cancer neuroscience will become even more important in future. This is because there are increasing indications that the nervous system plays an important role in the emergence and progression of cancerous diseases, also those outside the brain. In Heidelberg we have some of the world’s leading research groups in this field and, with our partners on the campus and in the region, we want to play a leading role in shaping this development, and to expand on it even more,” says Prof. Dr Michael Boutros, Dean of the Medical Faculty Heidelberg of Heidelberg University.
Frank Winkler studied human medicine in Hamburg, Freiburg, London (United Kingdom) and Cape Town (South Afrika), earning his doctorate at the University of Freiburg. After a research stay in 2003/2004 at Harvard University (United States) he completed his habilitation in neurology in 2010 at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU). In 2012 he accepted a professorship for neurooncology at Heidelberg University. Prof. Winkler is the Managing Senior Physician at the Department of Neurology of Heidelberg University Hospital and heads the Experimental Neurooncology Research Group, which belongs to the Clinical Cooperation Unit Neurooncology at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg. His research studies are also part of the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) “UNITE GLIOBLASTOMA – Understanding and Targeting Resistance in Glioblastoma”, which is coordinated at the Medical Faculty Heidelberg of Heidelberg University. Spokesperson of CRC 1389 is Prof. Dr Wolfgang Wick, Managing Director of the Department of Neurology who also heads the Clinical Cooperation Unit.
The Brain Prize advertised by the Lundbeck Foundation is the largest research prize worldwide in the field of neurosciences and neuromedicine. It honors highly original and influential advances in all areas of brain research, from fundamental neuroscience to applied clinical research. To date, a total of 47 scientists from eleven countries have received the prize, which has been awarded annually since 2011. The Copenhagen-based foundation funds research in the field of health sciences, with particular focus on the brain. The King of Denmark, as patron, will present this year’s Brain Prize during a ceremony on 28 May in Copenhagen.