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Christian Hackenberger
Christian Hackenberger (b. Osnabruck, 1976) is a German chemist. He heads the Hackenberger Research Group at the Leibniz Research Institute for Molecular Pharmacology and holds a Humboldt-Leibniz Professorship in Chemical Biology at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Life and Education
Christian Hackenberger grew up in Damme (Lower Saxony). He attended the Gymnasium Damme, where he graduated in 1995. After completing his civil service, he studied chemistry at the Alfred-Ludwig-Universität in Freiburg (1996-1998) and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1998-1999). He pursued his doctoral studies at the RTWH Aachen (2000-2003), where he worked under Prof. Carsten Bolm. During this time, he also worked as an editorial assistant in scientific journalism for the WDR broadcast "Quarks & Co". He was later a DAAD Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under Prof. Barbara Imperiali (2003-2005). In 2005, Hackenberger founded his own research group at the Freie Universität Berlin in 2005 as an Emmy Noether fellow. In 2012, he became Leibniz-Humboldt Professor for Chemical Biology at the Leibniz Research Institute for Molecular Pharmacology and the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. In 2020, Hackenberger co-founded the Munich-based biotechnology company Tubulis, which specializes in developing antibody-drug conjugates. He lives in Berlin and is married to the art historian Michel Otayek.

Research
Hackenberger’s research at the Leibniz Research Institute focuses on chemical strategies to functionalize proteins and antibodies using highly selective chemical reactions to generate protein-based therapeutics against cancer, Alzheimer and viral infections. A particular focus of Hackenberger's research group is the engineering of new reactions for the modification and cellular delivery of proteins and antibodies to advance their use in biological and pharmacological research.

Among Hackenberger’s achievements in medicinal chemistry is the development of next-generation antibody-drug-conjugates (ADCs). He is the inventor of P5-labeling, an unprecedented Cystein-selective labeling technology (Angew. Chem. 2019 #1), resulting in phosphonamidate-linked ADCs, which showed superior stability and efficacy compared the clinically approved multi-million dollar ADC Adcetris® (Angew. Chem. 2019 #2). Recent work from his laboratory demonstrated superb PK-stability of P5-linked ADCs (Chem. Sci. 2023), which allowed the engineering of new ADC modalities for acute myeloid leukemia (AML) therapy (Blood 2023) and the identification of a new exatecan-payload, a topoisomerase I inhibitor, for the development of ADCs (Mol. Cancer Ther. 2023).

Awards
Among other distinctions, Hackenberger has been awarded the Leonidas Zervas Award from the European Peptide Society (2018), the Falling Walls Foundation’s Breakthrough of the Year Award in the Life Sciences (2020), and the AstraZeneca Protein and Peptide Science Award (2023).