Matthias Hentze studied medicine in the UK at the medical schools at the universities of Southampton, Oxford, Glasgow and Cambridge, and in Germany at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, Münster from which he qualified in 1984. In the same year, he received his M.D. degree for a dissertation on the role of glycosylation in lysosomal enzyme expression with Kurt von Figura as his advisor. After a short phase of clinical work Hentze became a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health in 1985, having been awarded a fellowship by the German Research Foundation. In 1989, he joined the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg as an independent group leader. At the age of 30, he obtained the Habilitation from the Ruprecht-Karls University in Heidelberg and was appointed Dean of the EMBL International Ph.D. Programme in 1996. Together with Prof. Andreas Kulozik of the Medical Faculty of Heidelberg University, Hentze co-founded the Molecular Medicine Partnership Unit in 2002 and serves as its Co-Director. The MMPU represents the first institutional partnership between EMBL and a national research institution and is devoted to interdisciplinary research at the interface between molecular biology and clinical medicine. In 2005, Hentze became Associate Director of the EMBL and Professor for Molecular Medicine at the University of Heidelberg. In 2013, Hentze was appointed Director of EMBL, advising and supporting EMBL's Director General, Edith Heard. He is married and has three daughters. He regularly participates in marathons of the World Marathon Majors series.
Research
Hentze’s research focuses on RNA biology and RNA-binding proteins. In 1987, Hentze and his colleagues discovered iron-responsive elements as first example of an RNA element regulating the translation of mammalian mRNA into proteins. Hentze’s research group has paved the way for understanding translational control whose significance for developmental biology, brain function, carcinogenesis and other diseases has in the meantime become widely recognized. Moreover, he has made key discoveries in the area of iron metabolism and disease. In 2010, Hentze proposed the concept of REM Networks, a new interconnection between metabolism and gene expression on the basis of RNA-binding proteins. The research project was awarded the ERC Advanced Investigator Grant by the European Research Council in 2011. Work following this hypothesis led to the development of the “RNA Interactome Capture” technique and to the discovery of hundreds of formerly unknown RNA-binding proteins in the cells of living organisms from human to yeast, including more than 50 metabolic enzymes. Recently, Hentze and his colleagues discovered new RNA-binding motives of proteins which they unraveled using a newly developed method called “RBDmap”. In 2019, they described the concept of riboregulation. They found out that the autophagy receptor protein p62 is directly regulated by a small RNA, vtRNA1-1. Currently, their research focuses on how widely biological processes are riboregulated.
Hentze is or was a member of numerous international supervisory boards including the Scientific Advisory Board and Board of Trustees of the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine, the scientific advisory board of the Berlin Institute of Health, the Istituto Nazionale Genetica Molecolare , the Centenary Institute and the Cold Spring Harbor Conferences Asia. Furthermore, Hentze is the scientific co-founder of Anadys Pharmaceuticals.
Publications
Hentze is author of textbooks about Molecular Medicine and has published over 250 scientific original contributions.
