Christian Heinrich Maria Drosten is a German virologist whose research focus is on novel viruses . During the COVID-19 pandemic, Drosten came to national prominence as an expert on the implications and actions required to combat the outbreak in Germany.
From June 2000, Drosten worked as an intern in the laboratory group of the physician Herbert Schmitz in the virology department of the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg, where he headed the laboratory group Molecular Diagnostics and established a research program for the molecular diagnostics of tropical viral diseases. From 2007, Drosten headed the Institute of Virology at University Hospital Bonn. During this time he worked with Isabella Eckerle, who would go on to lead the department of emerging viruses at the University of Geneva. In 2017, he accepted a call to the Charité in Berlin, where he heads the Institute of Virology. From 2017 until 2019, Drosten was a member of the German Ministry of Health’s International Advisory Board on Global Health, chaired by Ilona Kickbusch.
On 23 January 2020, Drosten, along with other virologists in Europe and Hong Kong, published a workflow of a real-time PCRdiagnostic test, which was quickly accepted by the World Health Organization who sent test kits to affected regions. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Drosten was called by The Guardian as "the country's real face of the coronavirus crisis", who also noted that the Süddeutsche Zeitung had described Drosten as "the nation's corona-explainer-in-chief". He was a counterpart to, head of the State's Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, in consulting to German federal and state authorities. In March 2020, he was appointed to the European Commission's advisory panel on COVID-19, co-chaired by Ursula von der Leyen and Stella Kyriakides.
Research
Drosten is one of the co-discoverers of SARS-associated coronavirus. Together with, a few days after identification and before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, he succeeded in developing a diagnostic test for the newly identified virus in 2003. Drosten immediately made his findings on SARS available to the scientific community on the internet, even before his article appeared in New England Journal of Medicine in May 2003. Among others, this was honoured by the journal Nature. From 2012, the research group led by Drosten also researched the Middle East respiratory syndrome-coronavirus. For the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, which first appeared in December 2019, the research group led by Drosten developed a test that was made available worldwide in mid-January 2020. The group also published the sequenced genome from samples obtained in Germany. In the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, Drosten advises politicians and authorities and gets invited as an expert in the media, among others in the podcast , initially published daily during the week since 26 February 2020 in Norddeutscher Rundfunk, the frequency of the podcast having been gradually reduced from April 2020 until becoming weekly from 15 June 2020. Drosten is committed to the transparent distribution of scientific data and therefore publishes in specialist journals such as Eurosurveillance, where all articles are freely available online.
Recognition
At the end of 2003, Drosten, together with Stephan Günther, was awarded a prize by the Werner Otto Foundation for the Promotion of Medical Research for the identification of the SARS coronavirus and the establishment of a rapid diagnostic test system. In 2004, Drosten received the GlaxoSmithKline funding award for clinical infectiology, the Abbott Diagnostics Award of the European Society for Clinical Virology, the bioMérieux Diagnostics Award from the German Society for Hygiene and Microbiology and the post-doctoral award for virology from the. In 2005, he was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit.
Other activities
Non-profit organizations
National Research Platform for Zoonoses, Member of the Internal Advisory Board
