Prof. Achim Hoerauf

Prof. Achim Hoerauf is the Director of the Institute of Medical Microbiology, Immunology and Parasitology (IMMIP) at the University Hospital Bonn and Professor of Parasitology at the University of Bonn. He is a member of the German Center for Infection Research and coordinates the Bonn-Cologne site in addition to chairing the German Network against Neglected Tropical Diseases.

He is a leading expert in neglected tropical diseases, especially filariases, and is active in the development of diagnostic tools and new antimicrobials with scientific collaboration partners in Africa and South America and research collaborations with industry partners (Abbvie, Bayer, Celgene)

Professor Hoerauf is internationally renowned for his work in Tropical Medicine, specifically, for pioneering a new drug treatment for filariasis (a group of neglected tropical diseases). The new treatment exploits the symbiosis between the filarial nematodes and bacterial endosymbionts called Wolbachia, which are susceptible to some classes of antibiotic. The feasibility of delivering a safe macrofilaricidal drug has sparked the development of macrofilaricidal research programmes by the Gates Foundation and DNDi. Prof. Hoerauf’s group was the first to characterize a TLR2 ligand from Wolbachia, and established that blindness brought about by filarial antigens as the worm larvae migrate into the eye in onchocerciasis (or “river blindness”) is dependent on Wolbachia, and again mediated by the innate immune system. Prof. Hoerauf’s second focus is in the field of infection immunity, where his group was the first to detect regulatory T cells in humans in an infection.