Scientific Career

Prof. Dr. Frank Buchholz is full Professor for medical systems biology and head of translational research at the university cancer center of the TU Dresden since 2010.

As a PhD student till 1997 at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, he performed seminal work to implement and improve site-specific recombinases for genome engineering.

During his postdoctoral time at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), he showed for the first time that these enzymes can induce a predefined chromosomal translocation in vivo and he invented substrate-linked directed evolution to breed recombinases with novel specificities.

From 2002 to 2010, he perfectionated this approach as an independent group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) in Dresden to develop the Tre recombinase, an enzyme that can eradicate HIV from infected cells. The approach is now developed into a designer-recombinase platform technology and is supported by a number of research grants.

Prof. Dr. Frank Buchholz is also widely known for his development of the esiRNA technology and its implementation as an efficient and specific RNAi screening tool. Employing this tool, he has discovered many new genes relevant for stem cell biology and human diseases. His group has recently extended functional profiling via RNAi and CRISPR/Cas9 technology to primary cells, with the goal to apply this technology to personalized medicine.