The homepage of the Institute of Immunology has moved.
You can now find the current homepage at the following link:
 

Institute of Immunology

Profile of the former institute director Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Hans-Georg Rammensee

(Emeritus, Senior Professor, Institute of Immunology, University of Tübingen, Germany)

Hans-Georg Rammensee (*12 April 1953, Tübingen) is a German immunologist internationally recognized for his seminal contributions to peptide antigen presentation by MHC molecules and to personalized cancer immunotherapy. He is considered a pioneer of personalized cancer vaccination and a co-founder of mRNA vaccine technology.

Life and Academic Career

Rammensee studied biology at the University of Tübingen from 1974 to 1980 and completed his doctoral thesis at the Max Planck Institute for Biology under Jan Klein. Postdoctoral research appointments led him to the Scripps Research Institute (La Jolla) and the Basel Institute for Immunology. From 1987 to 1993, he headed a research group at the Max Planck Institute for Biology in Tübingen. He subsequently became Professor at the University of Heidelberg and led the Division of Tumor Virus Immunology at the German Cancer Research Center (1993–1996).
In 1996, he assumed the Chair of Immunology at the Interfaculty Institute of Cell Biology at the University of Tübingen, where he remained until his retirement in 2023; he has continued his work as a Senior Professor since then.

Research

Rammensee and his research groups investigated the molecular principles of peptide presentation by MHC molecules, thereby establishing fundamental insights into T-cell recognition, tolerance development, and vaccine design. Analyses of naturally presented MHC peptides conducted by Kirsten Falk, Olaf Rötzschke, Günther Jung, and Stefan Stevanović demonstrated that each MHC allele exhibits a distinct peptide specificity (allele-specific peptide motif). These findings enabled, for the first time, accurate predictions of naturally presented peptides and led to the development of bioinformatic tools and databases for identifying T-cell-recognizable antigens.

Building on this foundation, he has worked extensively on the development of personalized peptide vaccines against cancer. His translational approach (“from bench to bedside”) established a basis for modern personalized immunotherapies. In Tübingen, he directed, among others, Collaborative Research Centers 510 (“From Stem Cells to Immunotherapy”) and 685 (“Immunotherapy”), as well as the research network for Translational Immunology.

Within the Excellence Cluster iFIT (“Image-guided and Functionally Instructed Tumor Therapies”), Rammensee served as co-initiator and head of the Immunotherapy research area. He also played a leading role in the German Consortium for Translational Cancer Research (DKTK) since its establishment in 2011. He is regarded as one of the pioneers of personalized cancer immunotherapy.

mRNA Vaccination

As early as the 1990s, Rammensee—together with Günther Jung, Ingmar Hoerr, and Reinhard Obst—demonstrated that mRNA can be used as a vaccine platform. These studies laid the groundwork for the development of modern mRNA vaccines by companies such as CureVac, BioNTech, and Moderna, establishing Rammensee as one of the key trailblazers of this technology.

Support of Early-Career Scientists

Rammensee supervised more than one hundred doctoral dissertations and led two graduate programs. Numerous former trainees have since obtained professorships, including appointments in Düsseldorf, Fribourg, Heidelberg, Mainz, Tübingen, and Zurich.

Entrepreneurial Activities

Rammensee co-founded or served as a founding advisor to several biotechnology companies, including Immatics, CureVac, Prime Vector, Atriva, BamOmaB, Synimmune, and ViferaXS.

Honors and Memberships

His numerous awards include the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, the Robert Koch Prize, the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize, the Meyenburg Prize, the German Cancer Aid Prize, the Baden-Württemberg State Research Prize, the Jung Prize for Medicine, and the Familie Hansen Prize. He is a member of the Academy of Sciences and Literature, Mainz, and of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.