Professor Stefan Barth
IDM Member and Dept of Integrative Biomedical Sciences (IBMS)

Host: Professor Jonathan Blackburn
Dept of Integrative Biomedical Sciences and Member of the IDM

Prof Barth, holds a Tier 1 South African Research Chair in Cancer Biotechnology at the Department of Integrative Biomedical Sciences and acts as Executive Director of the UCT accredited Medical Biotechnology & Immunotherapy Research Unit. He is Full Member of the UCT Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine, as well as co-founder and CEO of curIT Biotech SA. He received his PhD in Botany and Genetics from the University of Bonn, and his DMSc at the University of Cologne, where he established where he established one of the first recombinant immunotherapy labs in Germany. As Head of Department of Pharmaceutical Product Development, he was involved in designing and building up a new Fraunhofer Institute in Aachen. In parallel, he was appointed Full Professor of Experimental Medicine and Immunotherapy at the RWTH Aachen. His research group investigates pharmaceutically relevant fusion proteins binding to disease-specific cell surface markers with the overarching goal of providing innovative approaches for selective identification and elimination of diseases relevant to the African continent. The main characteristics of these novel recombinant agents are a) disease-specific activities, b) reduced unspecific side effects, and c) reduced immunogenicity. During the last > 25 years of work in the field of medical biotechnology he successfully acquired about 75 funded projects, thus raised R452.638.857, filed 36 different patent family applications (> 178 individual patent applications), wrote 209 peer-reviewed publications (ORCHID) with a cumulative total IF of >1.000 (h-Index: 40, i10.index: 155) with >350.000 downloads from journal homepages, >42.000 reads in Research Gate, and >6.100 citations in Google Scholar. He has supervised 232 PG students excluding the 31 PG students supported in 2023.