Klaus Rajewsky

Klaus Rajewsky is a German immunologist, renowned for his work on B cells.

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He studied medicine in Frankfurt, Munich and at the Pasteur Institute, Paris. In 1964, he started working at the Institute of Genetics in the University of Cologne, where he became professor for genetics. He researched Hodgkin's disease and the role of B cells within the immune system. He also developed conditional knockout mice based on Cre-Lox recombination.

He is one of the founding fathers of the German society for immunology (1967). Since 1994, he is a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences. From 1995 to 2001 he was head of the Monterontondo research center near Rome. In 1996, he was awarded the Robert Koch Prize (shared with Fritz Melchers). In 1998, he founded Artemis Pharmaceuticals, together with Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and Peter Stadler.

In 2001, he started working at the Center for Blood Research at Harvard Medical School, Boston, where an additional focus of his work concerns RNAi, especially microRNAs, in conjunction with immune development and control.

Awards

• 1977 Avery-Landsteiner Prize of the German society for immunology
• 1994 Behring Kitasato Prize
• 1996 Robert Koch Prize, together with Fritz Melchers
• 1997 Körber Prize for European Science
• 2001 Deutscher Krebshilfepreis, together with Martin-Leo Hansmann and Ralf Küppers
• 2004 Honorary degree of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main
• 2005 Charles Rodolphe Brupbacher Prize for Cancer Research, together with Mariano Barbacid