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Oliver Eickelberg: a rising star of respiratory medicine
Perspectives
“Every freaking birthday”, Oliver Eickelberg remembers, his grandfather, uncles, and parents wanted to know when he was going to start studying for his family’s chosen vocation—engineering. But the young Eickelberg never felt an emotional pull towards the world of machinery and mathematics, and when the time came to choose, his choice was medicine. It was undoubtedly the right one: at the tender age of 44, Eickelberg is already Chairman of the Comprehensive Pneumology Center, a translational research centre established by the Helmholtz Zentrum Munich, the University Hospital of the Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich, and the Asklepios Hospital in Munich. He is also Vice-Chairman of the German Center of Lung Research. His precocious talent marks him out as the rising star of “the ‘younger generation’ of outstanding investigators in the field of lung diseases”, according to Jacob Sznajder, the Chief of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, Chicago, USA. Even in his youth, the subject of lung health was always at the back of Eickelberg’s mind. Growing up in Dortmund, in Germany’s industrial heartland, Eickelberg suffered from severe asthma until his late teens. But it wasn’t until his first medical rotation in Vienna, Austria, that his interest in the lung took academic form. By chance he was rotated onto a respiratory medicine ward, he recalls, “and that’s where I really first got in touch with respiratory medicine, and pulmonary fibrosis, which has been around for me ever since”. That rotation helped Eickelberg get his first junior house job in the respiratory division at the University Hospital in Basel, Switzerland, and he just “stuck with it”. After a 2-year affair with nephrology at Yale University, under the tutelage of Michael Kashgarian and Gerhard Giebisch, courtesy of a fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Eickelberg returned to his first love of respiratory medicine for a further 2 years as a postdoctoral researcher in Yale’s pulmonary medicine programme with Gabriel G Haddad. It was a transformative time. “The University system was so much different; in Germany the system is much stiffer”, he says. “I think the main difference is the openness and the interdisciplinarity, which I think is really prominent in the States. It’s totally common to go outside your lab and into the next lab to get advice. So you meet a lot of interesting people and I think that was a spirit that at least I had not seen in Europe that much.” In 2002, after 4 years at Yale, Eickelberg reached a crossroads. Pondering whether to follow his mentor Haddad to New York, stay at Yale, or take up opportunities in Austria or Switzerland where he had trained previously, an advert in Nature for a position as junior group leader at the University of Giessen in Germany caught his eye. “I wrote to the www.thelancet.com Vol 380 August 18, 2012
chairman there to ask whether he would be interested in my application”, he recalls, “and I didn’t expect very much from it. But I got a phone call from him 5 minutes later saying ‘absolutely apply, we’ll fly you in, when can you come’.” That chairman was Werner Seeger. “It was immediately evident to me that he would bring another level of expertise to our centre, both from a scientific and an educational view”, Seeger recalls of his first meeting with Eickelberg. Shortly after Eickelberg’s arrival the pair founded an international graduate programme on molecular biology and medicine of the lung, making extensive use of the ideas that Eickelberg had picked up during his time at Yale. “Today”, says Seeger, “we have graduated more than 80 students who are now all over the world, and the programme is well known across the world largely due to Oliver’s relentless energy and initiative”. It was during this time at Giessen that Eickelberg began developing what Sznajder calls his “taste for talent”, by mentoring and recruiting “wonderful young investigators”. And it was a talent that would prove crucial to his securing of the chairmanship of the Comprehensive Pneumology Center in 2008. Today the Comprehensive Pneumology Center employs about 100 people, but when Eickelberg arrived the whole place only existed on paper. It took 4 years to build the centre; “we had to design the wards of the centre, the floor plans and everything, we really did it from scratch”, Eickelberg recalls. “I think the most important thing that helped us get where we are now is teamwork. I have a beautiful team of scientists and scientific managers”, he says. “The 4 years were fantastic, rocky at times, difficult, but it was very rewarding.” Now, Eickelberg is looking forward to leading the centre into what he hopes will be a pivotal decade for respiratory medicine. “I think in respiratory medicine we have the most important diseases, the top killers in the world, that we cannot cure, and that we cannot even understand”, he says with some passion. “I mean COPD fibrosis, we barely understand the basic mechanisms of it, and as such we have no real curing drugs. The only curing drugs in respiratory medicine are antibiotics for infection.” But if progress until now has been painfully slow, there are signs that a tipping point has been reached. “We’ve witnessed this explosion of science in respiratory medicine, in stem cell biology of the lung, in signalling systems of the lung, and I think we’re on the verge now of putting all this into clinical practice”, Eickelberg says. “I think this is one of the most important times. And I hope our centre, together with others, will put it into practice in the next 10 years.”
Helmholtz Zentrum München
Profile Oliver Eickelberg: a rising star of respiratory medicine
See Series page 680
David Holmes 641
“Every freaking birthday”, Oliver Eickelberg remembers, his grandfather, uncles, and parents wanted to know when he was going to start studying for his family’s chosen vocation—engineering. But the young Eickelberg never felt an emotional pull towards the world of machinery and mathematics, and when the time came to choose, his choice was medicine. It was undoubtedly the right one: at the tender age of 44, Eickelberg is already Chairman of the Comprehensive Pneumology Center, a translational research centre established by the Helmholtz Zentrum Munich, the University Hospital of the Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich, and the Asklepios Hospital in Munich. He is also Vice-Chairman of the German Center of Lung Research. His precocious talent marks him out as the rising star of “the ‘younger generation’ of outstanding investigators in the field of lung diseases”, according to Jacob Sznajder, the Chief of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, Chicago, USA. Even in his youth, the subject of lung health was always at the back of Eickelberg’s mind. Growing up in Dortmund, in Germany’s industrial heartland, Eickelberg suffered from severe asthma until his late teens. But it wasn’t until his first medical rotation in Vienna, Austria, that his interest in the lung took academic form. By chance he was rotated onto a respiratory medicine ward, he recalls, “and that’s where I really first got in touch with respiratory medicine, and pulmonary fibrosis, which has been around for me ever since”. That rotation helped Eickelberg get his first junior house job in the respiratory division at the University Hospital in Basel, Switzerland, and he just “stuck with it”. After a 2-year affair with nephrology at Yale University, under the tutelage of Michael Kashgarian and Gerhard Giebisch, courtesy of a fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Eickelberg returned to his first love of respiratory medicine for a further 2 years as a postdoctoral researcher in Yale’s pulmonary medicine programme with Gabriel G Haddad. It was a transformative time. “The University system was so much different; in Germany the system is much stiffer”, he says. “I think the main difference is the openness and the interdisciplinarity, which I think is really prominent in the States. It’s totally common to go outside your lab and into the next lab to get advice. So you meet a lot of interesting people and I think that was a spirit that at least I had not seen in Europe that much.” In 2002, after 4 years at Yale, Eickelberg reached a crossroads. Pondering whether to follow his mentor Haddad to New York, stay at Yale, or take up opportunities in Austria or Switzerland where he had trained previously, an advert in Nature for a position as junior group leader at the University of Giessen in Germany caught his eye. “I wrote to the www.thelancet.com Vol 380 August 18, 2012
chairman there to ask whether he would be interested in my application”, he recalls, “and I didn’t expect very much from it. But I got a phone call from him 5 minutes later saying ‘absolutely apply, we’ll fly you in, when can you come’.” That chairman was Werner Seeger. “It was immediately evident to me that he would bring another level of expertise to our centre, both from a scientific and an educational view”, Seeger recalls of his first meeting with Eickelberg. Shortly after Eickelberg’s arrival the pair founded an international graduate programme on molecular biology and medicine of the lung, making extensive use of the ideas that Eickelberg had picked up during his time at Yale. “Today”, says Seeger, “we have graduated more than 80 students who are now all over the world, and the programme is well known across the world largely due to Oliver’s relentless energy and initiative”. It was during this time at Giessen that Eickelberg began developing what Sznajder calls his “taste for talent”, by mentoring and recruiting “wonderful young investigators”. And it was a talent that would prove crucial to his securing of the chairmanship of the Comprehensive Pneumology Center in 2008. Today the Comprehensive Pneumology Center employs about 100 people, but when Eickelberg arrived the whole place only existed on paper. It took 4 years to build the centre; “we had to design the wards of the centre, the floor plans and everything, we really did it from scratch”, Eickelberg recalls. “I think the most important thing that helped us get where we are now is teamwork. I have a beautiful team of scientists and scientific managers”, he says. “The 4 years were fantastic, rocky at times, difficult, but it was very rewarding.” Now, Eickelberg is looking forward to leading the centre into what he hopes will be a pivotal decade for respiratory medicine. “I think in respiratory medicine we have the most important diseases, the top killers in the world, that we cannot cure, and that we cannot even understand”, he says with some passion. “I mean COPD fibrosis, we barely understand the basic mechanisms of it, and as such we have no real curing drugs. The only curing drugs in respiratory medicine are antibiotics for infection.” But if progress until now has been painfully slow, there are signs that a tipping point has been reached. “We’ve witnessed this explosion of science in respiratory medicine, in stem cell biology of the lung, in signalling systems of the lung, and I think we’re on the verge now of putting all this into clinical practice”, Eickelberg says. “I think this is one of the most important times. And I hope our centre, together with others, will put it into practice in the next 10 years.”
Helmholtz Zentrum München
Profile Oliver Eickelberg: a rising star of respiratory medicine
See Series page 680
David Holmes 641