Uwe Marx (born 26 June 1964) is a German physician and biotechnologist, and one of the world’s leading researchers in the fields of organ-on-a-chip technology and antibody production.
Academic Education He gained his qualification as a medical doctor with a specialization in biochemistry in 1988 and his MD in 1991 at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin (a joint medical faculty of the Humboldt University and Free University Berlin) with his thesis on Human Monoclonal Antibodies.
Professional Academic Positions Uwe Marx was the head of the Department of Immunobiotechnology at the Institute of Medical Immunology, Charite – Universitätsmedizin Berlin between 1991 and 1995. He was the head of the Department of Medical Biotechnology at the Institute of Immunology and Transfusion Medicine, University of Leipzig between 1995 and 2000. He was the head of the GO-Bio Multi-Organ Chip Program “Multi-organ-bioreactors for the predictive substance testing in chip format,” which was supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), at the Institute of Biotechnology, Technische Universität Berlin between 2010 and 2019. This led to the establishment of a multi-organ chip technology capable of maintaining more than 15 miniature human organ equivalents, such as liver, brain, skin, intestine and pancreatic islets, at a homeostatic steady state over periods of at least four weeks. Uwe Marx was appointed an Honorary Professor of Medical Biotechnology at the Technische Universität Berlin in 2022.
Career Uwe Marx is a world-renowned German physician and biotechnologist, specializing in the fields of organ-on-a-chip technology and antibody production. He is a physician, biotechnologist, successful serial entrepreneur, author, and inventor of as many as 30 patent families, which have led to more than 140 patents granted. He has published more than 130 peer-reviewed scientific papers. He is the co-founder of the German biotech companies: VITA 34 A.G., ProBioGen A.G. and TissUse GmbH.He has extensive experience in human biology and medicine, and is currently one of the world’s leading researchers in the field of microphysiological systems (MPS) technology, pioneering the field of human multi-organ chips. He was an early innovator in employing relevant non-animal models to develop more predictive human data with a vision to define human risk better and make safe drugs available to the patients faster. When he began his career in the early 1990s, rodents and higher species were used, to a large extent, to test the effects of pharmaceutical products, cosmetic compounds and other chemicals. He quickly recognized that the results of animal testing may not guarantee the same responses in humans. Improving the relevance to humans and potentially replacing animal testing with a more accurate and controllable approach was an urgent need. In 1989, while studying for his MD, he planned to recreate human immune organs and mimic organ functions and interactions outside a living organism. One of his first research projects in 1991 involved the “in vitro production of monoclonal antibodies (mAbs)” to replace the standard method to “culture […] hybridoma cells producing monoclonal antibodies in the ascites mouse.” He and his team developed a hollow-fiber culture system for culturing hybridoma cells, which produce mAbs. He was, therefore, able to show that an in vivo method could replace the highly criticized ascites mouse method by applying advanced biotechnology to cell culture. In 1994, Uwe Marx was one of the founders of ProBioGen AG, in Berlin. He joined the company as Chief Scientific Officer in 2000. Within this biotech company, he developed, among other products, a Human Artificial Lymph Node (HuALN) model which enables the prediction of human immune responses triggered by drug candidates in vitro. Using primary cells, this three-dimensional matrix bioreactor technology emulates in vivo-like reactions of a human lymph node to analyze, for example, immunogenicity, immune functions and the immunotoxicity of substances. He was the CSO of ProBioGen AG until 2010. In 1997, Uwe Marx was one of the founders of VITA 34 AG, in Leipzig, where he established the GMP-compliant cryopreservation process for the umbilical cord blood samples. Between 1999 and 2003, he was one of the founders and a supervisory board member of Novoplant AG, in Gatersleben, which ceased trading in 2008. In 2007, while still at ProBioGen AG, Uwe Marx published his vision of the multi-organ-chip (MOC) concept for the first time in his book “Drug Testing In Vitro – Breakthroughs and Trends in Cell Culture Technology”. He describes the concept of the “micro-organoids” on which the perfused human MOC is based, in Chapter 11 (p. 318), “How drug development of the 21st century could benefit from human micro-organoid in vitro technologies,” as follows:
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