Christoph J. Binder, MD PhD
Group Leader
Univ.-Prof.
Medical University of Vienna,
Department of Laboratory Medicine, KILM
Anna Spiegel Research Building
Lazarettgasse 14, AKH BT25.2, Level6
1090 Vienna, Austria
Christoph J. Binder was born in 1973 in Vienna, Austria. Following his studies of medicine at the Medical Faculty of the University of Vienna, where he obtained his MD degree in 1997, he entered a PhD program at the University of California in San Diego, where he obtained his PhD degree in Molecular Pathology at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) in 2002.
Following a postdoctoral training period at UCSD, he joined the Department of Laboratory Medicine at the Medical University of Vienna in 2005 and became Principal Investigator at the Research Center for Molecular Medicine (CeMM).
In 2009 he was appointed Professor of Atherosclerosis Research at the Medical University of Vienna.
Know-how and research interests
Christoph Binder is a specialist in laboratory medicine and leads a research group focusing on the role of immune functions in atherosclerosis and how these can be exploited for therapeutic interventions. His interests are clearly interdisciplinary and span vascular biology, lipid oxidation, natural antibodies and innate immunity. He first described the atheroprotective effect of pneumococcal vaccination and the natural IgM T15/E06 (Binder et al., 2003).
His research group discovered that certain oxidation-specific epitopes derived from lipid peroxidation are major targets of natural antibodies (Chou et al., 2009) and of complement factor H (Weismann et al., 2011). He also identified the athero-protective roles and mechanisms of the cytokines IL-5 (Binder et al., 2004) and IL-13 (Cardilo-Reis et al., 2012), as well as natural IgM antibodies (Gruber et al., 2016; Tsiantoulas et al., 2017). Recent work focused on the identification and characterization of mitochondrial extracellular vesicles (Puhm et al., 2019). He has won numerous prestigious fellowships and awards and has authored >130 publications in renowned journals, including Nature Medicine and Nature.
Main Research Interests
- Role of innate immunity in inflammation and oxidative stress
- Elucidate the protective capacities of natural lgM antibodies in atherosclerosis and thrombosis
- Discover ways to modulate immunity as therapy for cardiovascular diseases
Christoph J. Binder coordinates an international research network investigating the role of B cells in cardiovascular disease. The BCVD project is being funded by the Leducq Foundation within the scope of a Transatlantic Networks of Excellence programme with a sum of 6.5 million US dollars.
