Biography:
Thomas Bernd Dschietzig studied Medicine at Charité, the Medical Faculty of the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany, from 1987 to 1993. He graduated with work on erythrocyte sedimentation at the Institute of Medical Physics and Biophysics, Department of Hemorheology, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Dietmar Lerche. He began working at the Charité Medical Clinic for Cardiology and Angiology (Head: Prof. Dr. med. Gert Baumann) in March 1994. His first position was exclusively focused on basic research in cardiology, and he published his first reports on the pathophysiological role of pulmonary vascular endothelin-1. Those investigations founded the basis of his ongoing work on cardio-vascular mediators, with his particular interest being dedicated to heart failure and pulmonary circulation. From 1997 to 2010, T. B. Dschietzig worked in teaching, research, and clinical routine at Charité Hospital. In 2003, he became a specialist in Internal Medicine and habilitated for Internal Medicine with the work “Cardio-vascular mediators of pulmonary vascular origin in heart failure and sepsis”. His clinical focus lay on medical intensive care; and he was a senior physician of a medical intensive care unit, equipped for maximum cardio-vascular care including extra-corporeal heart and lung assist and post-operative cardio-surgical care, from 2004-2007 and 2009-2010.
Since 1999, T. B. Dschietzig’s research has been focused on experimental and clinical studies on the physiology and pathophysiology of the hormone relaxin. His group at Charité Hospital was the first to demonstrate the endogenous expression of relaxin in human circulation and its compensatory role in human heart failure. These studies earned him the Virchow Prize of the Charité, in 2000, and the Young Investigator Award of the European Society of Cardiology, in 2001. The relaxin research culminated in conducting a clinical pilot study in patients suffering from heart failure which enabled the current therapeutic use of relaxin in cardiology. He holds several patents on relaxin and published experimental and clinical studies in high-ranking journals such as Circulation, Circulation Research, FASEB Journal, and others. In acknowledgment of his scientific merits, he was appointed Associate Professor at Charité in 2011. Since 2011, T. B. Dschietzig has been working with the biomarker company Immundiagnostik which develops and distributes diagnostic tests for various medical fields. At Immundiagnostik’s, he is responsible for research and development as well as scientific representation. Besides, he continues teaching and doing research. T. B. Dschietzig is Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Relaxera. Since 2016, this company has been dedicated to developing synthetic human relaxin-2 for chronic clinical use in cardiovascular disease.
