Joachim Hauber

Joachim Hauber (* 1955 in Stuttgart ) is a German virologist.

Life

Hauber studied biology at the University of Tübingen and received his doctorate in 1986 from the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich . As a post-doctoral student , he was with Hoffmann-La Roche in Nutley , New Jersey and at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Durham, North Carolina . From 1988 to 1996 he headed the Molecular Biology Department at the Sandoz Research Institute in Vienna . Then he was a professor at the Institute for Clinical and Molecular Virology at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg . In 2002 he became head of the Cell Biology and Virology Department at the Heinrich Pette Institute for Experimental Virology and Immunology (HPI) in Hamburg .

With his wife Ilona Hauber (from HPI) and with Indrani Sarkar and Frank Buchholz from the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden , he achieved a breakthrough in AIDS research in 2007. They succeeded for the first time in removing the virus DNA from the genome of the infected cell (in vitro) (i.e. reversing the infection) with the help of a specially manufactured Tre recombinase . Similar enzymes that specifically cut out parts of the cell's DNA were previously known in genetic engineering ( Cre recombinase ), but cannot be used here. They were helped, however, by the fact that at the beginning and end of the approximately 10,000 base pairs of the virus DNA there were long terminal repeats (LTR), where their newly developed recombinase could start. They used the directed evolution method to produce the recombinase .

In 1999 he and Frank D. Goebel received the Heinz Ansmann Prize for AIDS research.

Web links

• Portrait at the Körber Forum
• Heinz Ansmann Prize from the University of Düsseldorf

Individual evidence

1. ^ Hauber, Hauber, Sarkar, Buchholz HIV-1 Proviral DNA Excision Using an Evolved Recombinase , Science, Volume 316, 2007, pp. 1912-1915, abstract