Balázs Sarkadi, MD, Ph.D., professor of biochemistry, spent several years as a postdoctoral fellow and visiting researcher at major universities in the United States and Canada. For the past 10 years he has been Professor at Semmelweis University, where he has been leading the Membrane Research Group, while also working in research and diagnostics at the National Institute of Hematology. In 2005 he was elected a member of Academia Europeae, in 2007 President of the Federation of European Biochemical Societies (FEBS) and in 2010 elected as a full member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Currently, he is a member of several international research societies and is Vice President of the International Cell Research Organisation (ICROUNESCO) and the International Transmembrane Transport Society (ITTS). His research interests have focused on the ABC membrane transporters that play a major role in cancer multidrug resistance, general pharmacology, and normal and cancer stem cell function. He and his colleagues have developed new methods for the functional analysis of ABC transporter proteins and have developed compounds that modulate their function. In recent years, part of his research has continued to focus on ABC membrane transporters and the complex regulation of protein expression and cell signalling in stem cells and during stem cell differentiation. Her current project focuses on the regulation of membrane transporters in normal and cancer stem cells, including induced pluripotent stem cell generation and directed tissue differentiation. He has published more than 300 papers in international scientific journals, with over 16 500 citations (in WoS and 22 600 in Google Scholar) and an h-index of 68. He holds several international patents for commercial applications. In the last 10 years, he has published 91 publications with more than 1650 citations (WoS). As a thesis supervisor, he has 19 Ph.D. students who have successfully obtained their Ph.D. degrees, while he is currently supervising 3 Ph.D. students. He is the Hungarian representative of the European Medicines Agency and the founder of INNOCELL.