Axel Ullrich

Overview
Axel Ullrich born October 19, 1943) Lauban, Schlesien, Germany in is an German cancer researcher and has been the Director of Molecular biology at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany since 1988. His research has primarily focused on signal transduction.

After taking a degree in biochemistry at the University of Tuebingen, Germany, he received a Ph.D. from the University of Heidelberg in Molecular Genetics in 1975. He then did his postdoctoral work at the University of California, San Francisco from 1975 to 1977 and then worked as a senior scientist at Genentech in San Francisco, California from 1978 to 1988. From 1988, he has been at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry.

He was one of the developers of the anti-cancer drug Trastuzumab (trade name: Herceptin) and has founded at least three biotech companies one of which is Sugen which is owned by Pfizer.

He is listed by the Institute for Scientific Information) (ISI) as a highly cited biologist and he is also in the top ten of H-index of living biologists.