Professor Frank Boeckler

Department of Pharmacy and Biochemistry, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Laboratory for Molecular Design and Pharmaceutical Biophysics, Tuebingen, Germany

Dr. Boeckler is a W3 Professor of Medicinal Chemistry and Drug Design at the Department of Pharmacy and Biochemistry at Eberhard Karls University in Tuebingen. Since 2014, he is also member of the Center of Bioinformatics (ZBIT) of the University of Tuebingen. At the Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, he is head of the laboratory of Molecular Design & Pharmaceutical Biophysics, which combines Chemical Biology, Molecular and Structural Biology and Biophysics, as well as Computational Chemistry and Molecular Design. His work is dedicated to understanding molecular interactions as the foundation for chemical biology and drug discovery, to apply theoretical and biophysical methods to cancer research, and to develop novel peptide-based toolkits.

Studying receptor-ligand interactions in GPCR drug discovery from computational models to pharmacological consequences, Dr. Boeckler received his Ph.D. in Medicinal Chemistry with summa cum laude at Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen (Germany). He specialized in computational chemistry and drug design, ranging from QM methods to in silico screening. As a visiting scientist, he did research projects at the ETH Zurich (Behavioral Neurobiology) and at the Philipps University Marburg (Drug Design). In 2006, he joined Prof. Sir Alan R. Fersht at the MRC Center for Protein Engineering in Cambridge/UK as DFG and later Marie Curie fellow and discovered there p53 mutant stabilizers as potential new cancer therapeutics (PNAS 2008, 105, 10360). While working in Cambridge at the interface of experiment and theory, he focused on molecular biology and biophysics. In 2008, he was appointed as Professor (W2tt) for Bioanalytics at Ludwig-Maximilians University (LMU) Munich. In 2010, he moved to Eberhard Karls University Tuebingen as Professor for Medicinal Chemistry/Drug Design, where he now heads the Laboratory for Molecular Design & Pharmaceutical Biophysics. Since 2008, his lab has been developing methods and tools for improving the understanding and applicability of molecular interactions, particularly halogen bonding (XB). As innovative interactions, based on electron anisotropy and the formation of the σ-hole, halogen bonds bear the potential to extent the chemical space of pharmacophores in ligands targeting certain areas of the biological space (J. Med. Chem. 2013, 56, 1363). Tools and methods developed in the Boeckler lab range from XB scoring functions (J. Chem. Inf. Model. 2015, 55, 687) to halogen-enriched fragment libraries (JACS 2012, 134, 6810).

Dr. Boeckler serves as member of different Scientific and Editorial Advisory Boards. In 2015 he has joined the team of editors of the RÖMPP Encyclopedia covering the area of Pharmacy and Medicine. He has received multiple awards, including the Klaus-Grohe prize in Medicinal Chemistry, as well as the European Federation of Medicinal Chemistry (EFMC) Young Medicinal Chemist in Academia Prize (2016).

Updated 28 November 2023