Patrick A. Baeuerle studied biology at the universities of Konstanz and Munich (LMU), Germany, and holds a M.Sc. from the University of Konstanz and a Ph.D. summa cum laude from the LMU. He trained at the Max-Planck Institute for Neurochemistry in Martinsried and at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL, Heidelberg, Germany) with Prof. Wieland Huttner. Patrick’s graduate work was on tyrosine sulfation of proteins. From 1987-1989, he performed post-doctoral training with Nobel laureate Dr. David Baltimore at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA) where he discovered IkappaB and RelA (p65) subunits of transcription factor NF-kappaB, a key regular of inflammation and immune defense.

Back in Germany, Patrick led an independent research group at the GeneCenter of the LMU in Martinsried (Director: Prof. Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker) where he deciphered the canonical pathway of NF-kappaB activation and novel functions of the transcription factor. His habilitation at the LMU was in 1992. At the age of 34, Patrick was called as full Professor and Chairman of Biochemistry to the Medical Faculty of the University of Freiburg, Germany. After less than three years in Freiburg, he moved to California to head up small molecule drug discovery at Tularik, a biopharmaceutical start-up company based in South San Francisco.

From California, Patrick moved back in 1998 to Martinsried, Germany, where he became Chief Scientific Officer of Micromet, a biopharmaceutical company at the Institute for Immunology of the LMU. Over the years, Micromet became a pioneer in the industry in the development of so-called T cell-engaging bispecific (BiTE) antibodies for cancer therapy. Its CD19/CD3-bispecific BiTE antibody blinatumomab and drug pipeline led to the acquisition of Micromet by AMGEN in 2012 for $1.12B. Blinatumomab was approved by the FDA in 2014 in less than three months as Blincyto®, a therapy for treatment of patients with relapsed/refractory acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Patrick served for the following three years as Vice President of Research and General Manager of AMGEN Research Munich GmbH.

In 2015, Patrick joined the Boston-based venture capital firm MPM Capital LLC as an Executive Partner. Since then, Patrick has co-founded at MPM a total of eight biotech companies developing novel cancer therapies: Harpoon, iOmx, Maverick, TCR², Werewolf, Aktis, Cullinan and Crossbow. At Cullinan, he currently serves as Chief Scientific Advisor and Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board. Patrick is also a scientific advisor to iOmx, Aktis and Crossbow. Four of Patrick’s companies went public on NASDAQ (TCR², Harpoon, Cullinan and Werewolf), and three companies were acquired (Maverick, TCR² and Harpoon). Two are still private (Aktis and Crossbow).

Patrick is the recipient of Xconomy’s 2019 “Entrepreneur (“X”) of the Year” award, and of EMBL’s 2019 Lennart Philipson Award in recognition of his many contributions to the development of cancer immunotherapies. In 2021, he was elected by Endpoints News to be among the 20 most influential R&D executives in the US. To date, he has published 257 PubMed-listed papers that have been cited more than 87,000 times. He currently has a Hirsh index of 143 and was rated to be among the top 0.01% of most frequently cited scientists (Ioannides et al., 2019). Patrick Baeuerle is a member of the Leopoldina, Germany’s National Academy of Sciences.

Patrick is a passionate scientist, which made him critically look at the current narrative and science behind climate change, the ensuing political actions and the highly biased depiction of climate change in the media.