Rolf Müller's research focuses on discovering and developing innovative active substances to combat antimicrobial resistance, which is one of the greatest challenges facing modern medicine. He and his team use natural products from soil bacteria, particularly the unusual myxobacteria, as the basis for developing such molecules. Over the course of his career, Müller has established a globally unique program for discovering new myxobacterial strains, leading to the identification of thousands of new bacterial species and numerous new natural products. This collection now comprises over 10,000 different myxobacterial strains, isolated from environmental samples worldwide. Müller and his team characterize the identified natural products in various national and international collaborations, optimizing them for use as active ingredients in the treatment of infectious diseases in humans. To this end, methods from biotechnology, synthetic biology, analytical chemistry, bioinformatics and pharmaceutical sciences are developed and used in combination for drug optimization. Müller's work has been and continues to be supported by numerous international research funding organizations, including the Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the European Union, the Helmholtz Association, the German Center for Infection Research (DZIF), the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Faber Foundation and numerous pharmaceutical companies. Alongside basic research, Müller takes a strongly translational approach to translate the results into medically useful drugs and applications.
Rolf Müller received his doctorate in pharmaceutical biology from the University of Bonn in 1994, and also qualified as a pharmacist there. He then spent two years conducting research at the University of Washington in Seattle. He habilitated at the TU Braunschweig in 2000 and, in 2003, accepted a professorship in pharmaceutical biochemistry at Saarland University. That same year, he received the BioFuture Prize from the BMBF. Since 2008, Müller has played a key role in establishing and expanding HIPS, where he has served as Scientific Director since 2009. HIPS is currently the only non-university research institute in Germany dedicated to pharmaceutical research. In 2021, Rolf Müller was awarded the Leibniz Prize by the DFG.
