Giulio Superti-Furga

Giulio Superti-Furga (born 17 May 1962 in Milan) is an Italian molecular and systems biologist based in Vienna, Austria.

He is the Scientific Director of CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (CeMM), and Professor of Medical Systems Biology at the Medical University of Vienna.

In January 2024, he was appointed Chair of EU-LIFE, the alliance of research institutes advocating for excellent research in Europe.

Among his most significant scientific achievements to date are the elucidation of basic regulatory mechanisms of tyrosine kinases in human cancers, the identification of the molecular mechanisms of several drugs, and the discovery of fundamental organization principles of the proteome and the lipidome of higher organisms, as well as the characterization of molecular components relevant for innate immunity.

His work has directly contributed to a systems-level understanding of pathogen infections in host cells and of the mechanism of action of specific drugs.

He is an advocate for the adoption of systems biology approaches for medicine and in particular for drug discovery.

Recently, he focused his research on membrane transporters, which are at the interface between biological systems and the environment.

Despite their relevance for medicine and drug discovery, these proteins remain understudied and demand a intensive systematic study.

In 1995, he became Team Leader at EMBL in Heidelberg.

From 1997 to 2000 he served as Guest Professor of Molecular Biology at the University of Bologna, Italy.

The article "Functional organization of the yeast proteome by systematic analysis of protein complexes" by Gavin, AC*, 36 authors, Superti-Furga G* (* shared correspondence), Nature 2002 has been cited almost 6,000 times.

As scientific director of CeMM, Giulio Superti-Furga promoted a unique mode of super-cooperation, connecting biology with medicine, experiments with computation, discovery with translation, and science with society and the arts.

His research activities cover a broad set of disciplines from structural biology to clinical diagnostics, from immunology to metabolism, from atomic resolution to network structures.

His previous work focused on immunity and metabolism combined with the selective uptake of molecules and integrating it with drug action.

Recent research interests of Giulio Superti-Furga include novel ways to create functional personalized medicine approaches and understanding the role of the human membrane transporters in pathophysiology and drug discovery.

Membrane transporters can be considered the managers of the interface between chemistry and biology and between organisms and their environment.

Membrane transporters, and their roles in metabolism, drug transport and signaling are being investigated heavily in Giulio Superti-Furga’s laboratory.

As they are overall a large and neglected gene family in humans, Giulio Superti-Furga proposed to intensify and coordinate research on the largest group of membrane transporters in the human genome, the solute carrier (SLC) superfamily.

A large part of Giulio Superti-Furga’s laboratory in working in the RESOLUTE and REsolution projects supported by the IMI, the EU and the EFPIA.

RESOLUTE and REsolution are private-public partnerships co-led by Giulio Superti-Furga and Claire Steppan (Pfizer).

Since 2005 he has been Scientific Director of CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and guest professor for Molecular Pharmacology at the Medical University of Vienna.

In 2008, he was awarded the Knight Officer Order of Merit of the Republic of Italy for his contributions to science.

In 2011, Giulio Superti-Furga was awarded with the prize of the City of Vienna for natural sciences and designated as "Austria’s Scientist of the Year".

From 2013 to 2016 he was the ninth member of the Board of the University of Vienna.

Since the end of 2014, Giulio Superti-Furga chairs the steering board of the personal genome project Genom Austria, the Austrian Personal Genome Project initiative within the Global Network of Personal Genome Projects where he also participated: his personal genome sequence PGA1 is publicly available.

He is probably the first person whose entire own genome was given open access to in continental Europe.

According to Google Scholar, Giulio Superti-Furga has published more than 260 manuscripts that have been collectively cited > 47,000 times, reflected by an h-index of 100.

Since 2015 he has been appointed Professor of Medical Systems Biology at the Medical University of Vienna.

Giulio Superti-Furga is a full member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), the European Academy of Cancer Sciences, the Academia Europaea and chaired the board of the EMBL Alumni Association, which has ~2,500 members, until 2015.

In June 2017, was awarded the title of Commendatore (Commander) dell'Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana (Order of Merit of the Italian Republic) by HE Giorgio Marrapodi, Ambassador of Italy.

He is the brother of Andrea Superti-Furga, pediatrician and geneticist based in Switzerland.

Giulio Superti-Furga was educated at the German School of Milan (DSM) in Milan, Italy.

He performed his undergraduate and graduate studies in Molecular Biology with Meinrad Busslinger, Max Birnstiel and Charles Weissmann at the University of Zurich, at Genentech Inc. in San Francisco and at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna.

Giulio Superti-Furga was a post-doctoral fellow with Giulio Draetta, Sara Courtneidge at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg.

From 2017 to 2019 he was member of the Scientific Council of the ERC (European Research Council).

The ERC is the most important and prestigious funding institution for basic research in any field conducted within the European Union.

In 2018 he became the academic coordinator of the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) project RESOLUTE, a private public partnership including several universities, pharmaceutical companies and a biotech company to functionally understand solute carrier (SLCs) membrane transporters.

In 2021 he also became the academic coordinator of the Innovative Medicines Initiative REsolution project, which focus on the annotation and experiment study of SLC genetic variants.

Giulio Superti-Furga's work also deals with the societal framework and ethical implications of biomedical research.

At CeMM, there is a strong emphasis on a continuous dialogue with society and a responsible use of resources and technologies.