Biography
Jürgen Wolf is the Medical Director of the Center for Integrated Oncology (CIO) at the Cologne site. He holds a Professorship in Interdisciplinary Translational Oncology at the University of Cologne and serves as Head of the CIO’s Lung Cancer Program.
Prof. Wolf earned his doctorate at the University of Freiburg. From 1986 to 1990, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg, working in the tumor virology group led by Prof. Dr. Harald zur Hausen. In 1990, he began his clinical training at the Department I of Internal Medicine, University Hospital Cologne. He is board-certified in Internal Medicine with a subspecialty in Hematology/Oncology. From 1990 to 2003, he headed the laboratory for Hodgkin lymphoma research. Between 2000 and 2004, he was Co-Chair of the German Hodgkin Study Group (DHSG). Starting in 2004, he coordinated the establishment of the CIO in Cologne.
In 2005, he founded the Lung Cancer Group Cologne (LCGC), focusing strongly on mutation-specific early-phase trials. In 2010, together with Prof. Büttner, he launched the Cologne Network for Genomic Medicine (NGM) Lung Cancer to implement broad molecular diagnostics and personalized therapy for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) in routine clinical care. For this achievement, he received the Innovation Award of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia in 2016.
In 2018, together with Prof. Büttner, he founded the National Network Genomic Medicine (nNGM), expanding the NGM to a nationwide platform (www.nngm.de). Today, 29 nNGM centers collaborate with approximately 550 regional partners. The nNGM centers provide centralized molecular diagnostics, harmonized therapy recommendations, and centralized data collection, while most patients are treated at the regional partner sites.
Since 2019, Wolf has been a member of the Board of Directors of the CIO Aachen Bonn Cologne Düsseldorf; since 2021, a member of the Executive Board of the National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT) West (Cologne–Essen); since 2021, a member of the genomDE consortium, an initiative of the Federal Ministry of Health (BMG) for the implementation of genomic analyses in routine cancer care; and since 2022, a member of the advisory board of the Center for Cancer Registry Data (ZfKD) at the Robert Koch Institute.
In 2023, he received the Cancer Innovation Award from the ROS1ders, an international patient organization. In 2024, together with Roman Thomas and Reinhard Büttner, he was awarded the German Cancer Aid Prize for developing the Cologne Lung Cancer Program and the nNGM.
Photo by Bettina Flittner
