Professional Career
In 1985, after a brief residency in internal medicine, Hentze joined the laboratory of Richard D. Klausner at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA as a postdoctoral fellow supported by a fellowship from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. In 1987, Hentze and his colleagues discovered iron-responsive elements (IRE), showing for the first time gene regulation at the translational level in animal cells. In 1989, he joined the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg as a group leader. He served as Dean of the EMBL International Ph.D. Programme from 1996 until 2005 when he became Associate Director of the EMBL. In the same year, he became Professor for Molecular Medicine at the University of Heidelberg. Together with Andreas Kulozik of the Medical Faculty of Heidelberg University, Hentze co-founded the Molecular Medicine Partnership Unit (MMPU) (2002) and serves as its Co-Director. As the first institutional partnership between the EMBL and a national institution, the MMPU pioneers interdisciplinary research at the interface between molecular biology and clinical medicine. Hentze is also an Honorary Faculty Member of the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute in Sydney, Australia.
Hentze’s research team studies translational control by regulatory factors (RNA-binding proteins, microRNAs), which is now recognized to play important roles in development, central nervous system function, cancer, and many other diseases. Within the MMPU, Hentze contributes to investigations into diseases of RNA metabolism, especially on nonsense-mediated decay (NMD) and 3’end formation. Recently, Hentze proposed the concept of "REM networks", which posits that cellular metabolism and gene expression are connected via "RNA-binding" enzymes. (Hentze and Preiss, 2010)
Hentze is a co-founder of Anadys Pharmaceuticals, San Diego, California.
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