The Josef Rudinger Memorial Lecture Award is presented “in commemoration of Josef Rudinger’s role in the foundation of the European Peptide Symposia and of diverse contributions he made to peptide chemistry”. The Award is presented during the EPS Symposium and is sponsored by PolyPeptide Group.
The 2024 awardees are Professor Fernando Albericio and Professor David Andreu. Congratulations!
Fernando Albericio began his peptide journey almost 50 years ago in his native Barcelona. He earned his Ph.D. in Chemistry at the University of Barcelona (UB) under the guidance of Ernest Giralt. After several postdoctoral stays at Tufts University (Victor Najjar), Université d’Aix-Marseille (Jurphass van Rietschoten), and University of Minnesota (George Barany), he returned to Barcelona in 1985 as Associate Professor at the UB. From 1992-94, he was Director of Peptide Research at Millipore-Waters in Boston. He rejoined the UB after this period and was promoted to Full Professor in 1995. From 2003-2015, he was Group Leader at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB). From 2014-2015, he was the founding Rector of Yachay Tech, a research university in Ecuador. He was also a Visiting Professor at the King Saud University (Riyadh, Saud Arabia) (2014-2020). Currently, he is Research Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (South Africa) since 2016 and Emeritus Professor of Organic Chemistry at the UB.
Fernando has received several awards, including the Leonidas Zervas (1994) from the European Peptide Society, the Vincent du Vigneaud (2011) and Murray Goodman (2019) from the American Peptide Society, and the Johannes Meienhofer (2024) from the Boulder Peptide Foundation. He is Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina) (2013), has the Gold Medal of the South African Chemical Institute (SACI) (2022), and has received Lifetime Achievement Award by European Peptide Synthesis Conference, Europe, 2024
He is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Peptides Research & Therapeutics (Springer-Nature), Methods and Protocols (MDPI), and recently of Exploration of Drug Science (Exploration Publisher) and Associate Editor and Editorial Board Member of several other journals.
His primary research interests cover practically all aspects of peptide synthetic methodology; the synthesis of peptides and small molecules with therapeutic activities (cancer and infectious diseases); and peptide-based drug delivery systems. Most recently, he has been working on greening solid-phase peptide synthesis processes.
He has published over 1000 scientific articles, graduated more than 80 Ph.D. students, filled more than 60 patents, and more than 20 products developed in Fernando’s laboratory are in the market, including OxymaPure©, COMU©, PEG-PS© resin, PAL© linker, several Cys protecting groups (SIT, Phacm, Dpm, THP…).
Fernando is a clear defender of the concept of Entrepreneurial University, which is based on the transformation of knowledge generated through R&D&I into economic development and social well-being of the environment. He was the Founder and General Director of the Barcelona Science Park, which is considered the first university science park in Europe and is currently a promoter of BioDurban (South Africa).
David Andreu is professor of Chemistry (2002-23, emeritus September 2023) and head of the Protein Chemistry and Proteomics Laboratory at the Department of Medicine and Life Sciences of Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), Barcelona. David studied chemistry at University of Barcelona (UB), where he and Rüdinger co-awardee Fernando Albericio were classmates. Fortunately lured out of alkaloid into peptide chemistry by Ernest Giralt, he completed under his direction a PhD (1981, UB extraordinary award), then went on to perfect his training with Bruce Merrifield at Rockefeller University (New York), where some of his scientific interests (antimicrobial peptides, vaccines) were first aroused, and have remained active to this day. Since 1985-86 he was associate professor of organic chemistry at UB until his 2001 appointment at UPF as full professor of chemistry and research group leader (Protein Chemistry and Proteomics). On the academic side, he has coordinated UPF life sciences chemistry studies (2001-23), lecturing on basic, bioanalytical and medicinal chemistry. Research-wise, in 2-plus decades at UPF he has focused on bioactive peptides (antibiotics, vaccines, CPPs), and expanded into adjacent areas (proteomics, glycomics, mass spectrometry). He created and directed (2002-08) the UPF proteomics platform, integrated into the Spanish Proteomics Institute (ProteoRed), of which he was a promoter (2004). He has published >340 articles, reviews, and chapters on peptides, proteomics, and related topics, and is co-inventor of 16 patents on peptides with biomedical or veterinary applications. He has supervised 15 doctoral theses during his tenure at UB and another 9 at UPF. Since 2013, he has been editor-in-chief of Drugs of the Future, a Clarivate journal on drugs under development. He was founder and treasurer (2004-09) of the Spanish Proteomics Society (SEProt) and served as vice-president (2009-13) of the Spanish Society of Medicinal Chemistry (SEQT). In 2015, he received an honorary Doctor-et-Professor degree from Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest. In 2016, after two rounds as scientific affairs officer (2002-2010), he was elected president of the European Peptide Society (2016-20). He is co-founder (2023) of Disrupt Therapeutics, a UPF start-up developing peptide drugs to combat the cognitive side effects of medicinal cannabis use.