Felix B. Engel

Biography

I am a professor at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg. My expertise is cardiac regeneration and development, cardiac tissue engineering/biofabrication, and cancer research. I’ve got interested in cardiac research while a doctoral student in Dr. von Harsdorf's laboratory at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (Berlin, Germany, 1997). At that time, I developed a novel cell-free system in which cardiomyocyte nuclear replication could be monitored in vitro. This work resulted in two first author publications (Circ Res, 1999; Mol Cell Biol, 2003). After earning my Ph.D. degree in Cell Biology, I joined Mark Keating's laboratory at Harvard Medical School in 2001 to examine proliferation-based regenerative growth in the mammalian heart. Here, I observed that p38 MAP kinase activity levels were inversely related to cardiomyocyte cell cycle activity in a number of models. In addition, inhibition of p38 MAP kinase promoted cardiomyocyte proliferation in vitro. These results were published in Genes and Development (2005) leading to the upsetting of scientific dogma, and promise for new therapeutic approaches to cardiac disease. For this work I was awarded with the Children’s Hospital (Boston) Research Day Award and the Charles H. Hood Foundation Child Health Research Award. I then proved in vivo that inhibition of p38 MAP kinase contributes to cardiac regeneration. These results were published in PNAS (2005). Subsequently, I became faculty member at Harvard Medical School and was awarded the prestigious Sofja Kovalevskaja Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation endowed with around 1.5 Million Dollars. I continued my career at the Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research (Bad Nauheim, Germany) where Thomas Braun was my host. Here, I got involved in cardiac tissue engineering (focusing on silk) resulting in publications as last author in Biomaterials. Finally, I got appointed Professor and expanded once more my expertise working on cancer biology. This interest was initially based on the idea to learn from the heart how to suppress cancer, as primary tumors in the adult heart are extremely rare if they exist at all. I am previliged that a number of excellent PhD students and postdocs joined my lab resulting in publications as last author in world-leading Journals such as Cell Research, Advanced Functional Materials, PNAS, Biomaterials, and Development. In addition, I have contributed to publications in journals such as Cell, Developmental Cell, Molecular Cell, and European Heart Journal. Furthermore, I have edited a book entitled as “Heart Regeneration: Stem Cells and Beyond” and authored many book chapters. I have been frequently invited to different countries such as the United States of America, England, China, Taiwan and Germany to give lectures and seminars and served as nucleus member for the European Cardiac Society (ESC).