Keynote speaker Peter John Ratcliffe is a Professor of Medicine at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research. Above all, Sir Peter shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology with William Kaelin Jr. and Gregg L. Semenza.

Sir Ratcliffe studied renal medicine, with an emphasis on renal oxygenation. He began researching cellular oxygen sensing pathways in 1989, studying the regulation of erythropoietin, a hormone that stimulates and maintains red blood cells’ production.

Sir John’s study contributed to the discovery of a precise molecular sequence of events that cells employ to detect the presence of oxygen. Similarly, this pathway is disturbed in many tumors, allowing them to generate new blood vessels to support their growth. Ratcliffe’s laboratory has played a significant role in the development of our present understanding of hypoxia.

From 2004 until 2016, Ratcliffe was the head of the University of Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Medicine. He has been the Target Discovery Institute Director. Additionally, the Clinical Research Director of the Francis Crick Institute since 2016.

In 2019, he received the Medicine and Physiology Nobel Prize. He received it for his breakthrough discovery of how the human body responds to oxygen. Furthermore, in 2020, speaker Peter John Ratcliffe became a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.