The Vienna BioCenter is a cluster of life science research institutes and biotechnology companies located in the 3rd municipal District of Vienna, Austria. It grew around the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP), which opened in 1988. The entities at the Vienna BioCenter employ more than 2,000 people, including 600 students. [1] [2]
As of 2020, the Vienna BioCenter is an association of six research entities, 38 biotech companies, 1 outreach organisation, 4 service companies and 2 business incubators.[ citation needed ]
There are four basic research institutes on campus: the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP), the Max Perutz Labs of the University of Vienna and Medical University of Vienna, the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), and the Gregor Mendel Institute of Molecular Plant Biology (GMI), also of the ÖAW. [3] These institutes maintain a joint international PhD programme. [4] The University Biology Building (UBB) houses parts of the Faculty of Life Sciences and the Centre for Microbiology and Environmental Systems Science (CeMESS), both part of the University of Vienna.
In September 2024, the Boehringer Ingelheim Stiftung and Austrian Acaemy of Sciences (ÖAW) incepted the Aithyra Institute, a research organisation for Artificial intelligence and biomedicine [5] .
The "Vienna BioCenter Core Facilities" (VBCF) offer central services, largely scientific, but also including a child care centre. [6]
Kim Nasmyth, emeritus director of the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP), currently at the University of Oxford, received the 2018 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for his work on chromosome segregation. [7] [8]
After receiving the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, the 2020 Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna for their groundbreaking discoveries on the CRISPR/Cas9 system. Emmanuelle Charpentier was a principal investigator at the Max Perutz Labs at the University of Vienna from 2002 to 2009, where she laid the groundwork for developing the technology.
As of May 2021, scientists of the Vienna BioCenter institutes have been awarded 57 ERC grants and eleven Wittgenstein Awards. [9]
Kim Ashley Nasmyth is an English geneticist, the Whitley Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, former scientific director of the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP), and former head of the Department of Biochemistry, University of Oxford. He is best known for his work on the segregation of chromosomes during cell division.
The Austrian Academy of Sciences is a legal entity under the special protection of the Republic of Austria. According to the statutes of the Academy its mission is to promote the sciences and humanities in every respect and in every field, particularly in fundamental research.
The Gregor Mendel Institute of Molecular Plant Biology (GMI) is a basic research institute in Vienna, Austria. It was founded in 2000 by the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) to promote cutting-edge research in the field of molecular plant biology. The GMI employs about 130 people. Its founding director was Dieter Schweizer, and the current scientific director is Magnus Nordborg. The institute is named after Gregor Mendel, who is also known as the "Father of genetics," due to his scientific work and the fact that he studied at the University of Vienna in the mid-19th century.
The Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) is a biomedical research center, which conducts curiosity-driven basic research in the molecular life sciences.
The Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA) is an independent biomedical research organisation founded by the Austrian Academy of Sciences in cooperation with the pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim. The institute employs around 250 people from over 40 countries, who perform basic research. IMBA is located at the Vienna BioCenter (VBC) and shares facilities and scientific training programs with the Gregor Mendel Institute of Molecular Plant Biology (GMI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP), the basic research center of Boehringer Ingelheim.
Angelika Amon was an Austrian American molecular and cell biologist, and the Kathleen and Curtis Marble Professor in Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Amon's research centered on how chromosomes are regulated, duplicated, and partitioned in the cell cycle. Amon was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017.
The Wittgenstein Award is an Austrian science award supporting the notion that "scientists should be guaranteed the greatest possible freedom and flexibility in the performance of their research." The prize money of up to 1.5 million euro make it the most highly endowed science award of Austria, money that is tied to research activities within the five years following the award. The Wittgenstein-Preis is named after the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and is conferred once per year by the Austrian Science Fund on behalf of the Austrian Ministry for Science.
The Institute of Molecular Biology (IMB) is a modern research centre on the campus of the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. It is funded by the Boehringer Ingelheim Foundation and the state of Rheinland Palatinate. The scientists at IMB primarily conduct basic science in developmental biology, epigenetics, ageing, genome stability and related areas.
Jennifer Anne Doudna is an American biochemist who has pioneered work in CRISPR gene editing, and made other fundamental contributions in biochemistry and genetics. She received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, with Emmanuelle Charpentier, "for the development of a method for genome editing." She is the Li Ka Shing Chancellor's Chair Professor in the department of chemistry and the department of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. She has been an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 1997.
Emmanuelle Marie Charpentier is a French professor and researcher in microbiology, genetics, and biochemistry. As of 2015, she has been a director at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin. In 2018, she founded an independent research institute, the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens. In 2020, Charpentier and American biochemist Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for the development of a method for genome editing". This was the first science Nobel Prize ever won by two women only.
The Max Perutz Labs Vienna are a molecular biology research centre operated jointly by the University of Vienna and the Medical University of Vienna located at the Vienna Biocenter. The institute is named after the Viennese-born biochemist and Nobel laureate Max Ferdinand Perutz. On average, the institute hosts 50 independent research groups. Max Perutz Labs scientists participate in the undergraduate curricula for students of the University of Vienna and the Medical University of Vienna.
Max Luciano Birnstiel was a Swiss molecular biologist who held a number of positions in scientific leadership in Europe, including the chair of the Institute of Molecular Biology at the University of Zurich from 1972–86, and that of founding director of the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna from 1986 to 1996. His research focused on gene regulation in eukaryotes. His research group is sometimes cited as the first to purify single genes, the ribosomal RNA genes from Xenopus laevis, three years before the successful isolation of the lac operon. He is also recognized for one of the earliest discoveries of a gene enhancer element. Birnstiel died in 2014 of heart failure during cancer treatment.
Barry J. Dickson is an Australian neurobiologist who studies the development of neuronal networks in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Dickson is a group leader at the Janelia Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Loudoun County, Virginia and a former scientific director of the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna, Austria.
Elly Margaret Tanaka is a biochemist and Scientific Director at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (IMBA) in Vienna, Austria. Tanaka studies the molecular cell biology of limb and spinal cord regeneration as well as the evolution of regeneration.
Erwin Friedrich Wagner is an Austrian biochemist known for his research on the molecular basis of cancer and associated conditions such as inflammation and cachexia. He was deputy director of the Spanish National Cancer Research Center (CNIO) in Madrid, Spain, until 2019. Since 2019, Wagner is a group leader affiliated with the Medical University of Vienna.
Denise P. Barlow was a British geneticist who worked in the field of epigenomics. Barlow was an elected member of European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), an honorary professor of genetics at the University of Vienna and recipient of the Erwin Schrödinger Prize of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. In 1991, she discovered the first mammalian imprinted gene, IGF2R, which codes for the insulin-like growth factor.
Jan-Michael Peters is a cell- and molecular biologist. Since 2013, he is Scientific Director of the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna.
Arndt von Haeseler is a German bioinformatician and evolutionary biologist. He is the scientific director of the Max F. Perutz Laboratories at the Vienna Biocenter and a professor of bioinformatics at the University of Vienna and the Medical University of Vienna.
Andrea Pauli is a developmental biologist and biochemist studying how the egg transitions into an embryo, and more specifically the molecular mechanisms underlying vertebrate fertilisations, egg dormancy, and subsequent egg activation. Her lab uses zebrafish as the main model organism. Andrea Pauli is a group leader at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) at the Vienna Biocenter in Austria.
Francisco Balzarotti is an Argentinian scientist known for his work in super-resolution microscopy, particularly MINFLUX. He is a Group Leader at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna, Austria.
