Matthias Mann receives the prestigious Heineken Prize 2024
The pioneers of proteome research Matthias Mann and his colleague Ruedi Aebersold receive the Dr. H.P. Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics 2024
Biochemist Matthias Mann, Director and Head of the Department "Proteomics and Signal Transduction" at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried near Munich, together with Ruedi Aebersold, Professor Emeritus at ETH Zurich, will be awarded the Dr. H.P. Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics 2024. The jury recognizes their pioneering work in the field of proteomics and in particular the significant and groundbreaking technologies for studying proteins in a holistic approach. Thanks to their achievements, we now have a better understanding of how healthy cells function and how they differ from diseased cells.
Proteins are the molecular motors and machines of cells and play a decisive role in practically all biological processes. Without proteins, there is no cell division, no metabolism and no growth. For a long time, it was assumed that each protein fulfilled a specific function in isolation. Today we know that biology is much more complex. For example, proteins interact with many other proteins to fulfill different functions. In order to understand how processes take place in our body, we need to know which proteins are present and how they work together. Research into the overall picture of all proteins is known as proteomics research.
The jury of the Heineken Prize believes that Matthias Mann and Ruedi Aebersold have been the driving forces that created this field. Their work has made essential contributions to identifying and analyzing proteins and has provided new insights into their interactions. Both scientists have developed new, innovative techniques in the field of mass spectrometry, which, among other things, have enabled precise, quantitative measurements of thousands of proteins simultaneously, a method that has become the standard in research.
Mass spectrometry is used to measure the masses of proteins or their fragments. This information can be used to identify the proteins at extremely high sensititivity. Matthias Mann led the way together with his supervisor and inspiration John Fenn, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2002. He later developed an algorithm to find out which different proteins and how many of them are present in a test sample. Thanks to this ‘peptide sequence tag’ algorithm, many important proteins were discovered. Over three decades now Matthias Mann has made decisive contributions to the analysis of proteins in living systems.
About Matthias Mann
Matthias Mann, born in Thuine in 1959, studied physics and mathematics at the Georg-August University in Göttingen. In 1988, he received his doctorate in chemical engineering from Yale University in New Haven, USA. After a postdoctoral stay at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, he became group leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg in 1992. In 1998 he was appointed Professor of Bioinformatics at the University of Southern Denmark. Matthias Mann is Director at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried/Planegg near Munich since 2005. Since 2007, he also directs the Proteomics Program at the University of Copenhagen.
He has received numerous awards for his research, including the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine, the Körber Prize for European Science and the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize. With over 300,000 citations, Matthias Mann is the most cited scientist in Germany. Press releases on research from the Mann department can be found here.
About the Dr. H.P. Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics
Alfred Heineken founded the prize in 1964 as a tribute to his father, the chemist Henry Pierre Heineken. Every two years, the prize is awarded to a world-renowned researcher who has made groundbreaking discoveries in this field. All winners have contributed to cutting-edge research that has great potential to positively impact the lives of people worldwide, inspire young researchers and promote knowledge valorisation and effective scientific communication. The prize consists of a freely disposable cash prize of 300,000 USD and a trophy, funded by the Alfred Heineken Fondsen Foundation. In 2024, it will be 60 years since Alfred Heineken established the first Heineken Prize: the Dr. H.P. Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics. Half of the recipients have gone on to receive the Nobel Prize. For this special anniversary, the jury has decided to honor not just one, but two top scientists.
