Marcus Fandrich

Marcus Fandrich is the Director of the Institute of Protein Biochemistry at Universitat Ulmexternal link, opens in a new tab. After completing his biology studies at Heidelberg University, Fandrich went to Great Britain to do a biochemistry master's degree at the University of Cambridge. His master's degree thesis addressed aspects of protein folding, and his subsequent doctoral thesis at the University of Oxford focussed on finding the causes that prevented some proteins from adopting their correct three-dimensional structure, instead of forming insoluble amyloids and protein aggregates. He was highly fascinated by the basic research-oriented approach which he had chosen to elucidate one of the major principles of life.

At the start of his scientific career, Fandrich was specifically focussed on the basic mechanisms of protein folding and misfolding but has since shifted his research interest to amyloid fibrils and the elucidation of their structure. In some diseases (so-called amyloidoses), rather than folding into their native, three-dimensional structures, several amino acid chains come together, twist, and eventually form insoluble protein aggregates known as amyloid fibrils.