The Lundbeck Foundation and Brain Prize winners 2025: Michelle Monje and Frank Winkler
Michelle Monje and Frank Winkler are awarded The Brain Prize 2025 for pioneering the field of Cancer Neuroscience.
Selection committee statement
Professor Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, Chair of The Brain Prize selection committee explains the reasoning behind this year’s award.
“Gliomas are the most common primary brain tumours. They are very difficult to cure, and the more rapidly growing forms are almost universally fatal. Working independently, Michelle Monje and Frank Winkler have transformed our understanding of the biology of these neurological cancers.
They have discovered extensive interactions between glioma cells and neurons and have characterized their molecular and cellular basis. These networks exhibit hallmarks of functional neural circuits such as synapses, electrical and chemical communication and coordinated activity.
These mechanisms allow glioma cells to hijack activity in the brain to drive tumour growth, spread and treatment resistance. Strategies to modulate these interactions offer novel approaches for potential new glioma therapies.
Together, Monje and Winkler have pioneered a paradigm shift incorporating neuroscience into cancer research, forming what is now called ‘Cancer Neuroscience’. Both are practicing neurooncologists and exemplary clinician-scientists who have actively moved their mechanistic work into clinical trials.”
Furthermore on the Brain Prize 2025 Commentary
Michelle Monje
Milan Gambhir Professor of Pediatric Neuro-Oncology, Department of Neurology and Neurological Sciences, Stanford University and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. Michelle Monje, MD, PhD, received her M.D. and Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Stanford and completed her residency training in neurology at the Mass General Brigham program, and then returned to Stanford for a clinical fellowship in pediatric neuro-oncology.
Her research program focuses at the intersection of neuroscience, immunology and brain cancer biology with an emphasis on neuron-glial interactions in health and disease. Her laboratory studies how neuronal activity regulates healthy glial precursor cell proliferation, new oligodendrocyte generation, and adaptive myelination; this plasticity of myelin contributes to healthy cognitive function, while disruption of myelin plasticity contributes to cognitive impairment in disease states like cancer therapy-related cognitive impairment.
She discovered that neuronal activity similarly promotes the progression of malignant gliomas, driving glioma growth through both paracrine factors and through electrophysiologically functional neuron-to-glioma synapses, work that has proven foundational for the emerging field of Cancer Neuroscience. Michelle Monje has led several of her discoveries from basic molecular discoveries to clinical trials.
Her work has been recognized with numerous honors, including an NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, election to the National Academy of Medicine, the 2023 Paul Marks Prize, the 2023 Richard Lounsbery Award from the National Academy of Sciences, the 2024 Ross Prize in Molecular Medicine, and the 2025 International Prize of Translational Neuroscience from the Max Planck Society.
Frank Winkler
Professor for Neuro-Oncology, Heidelberg University Faculty of Medicine and Managing Senior Physician in the Department of Neurology.
Frank Winkler studied medicine in Hamburg, Freiburg and London, specialized in neurology at the LMU Munich in Germany, spent a 2 year postdoc at Harvard, and was appointed to Heidelberg in 2010.
The laboratory led by Frank Winkler employed neuroscientific methods to develop a fundamentally new understanding of the most malignant brain tumors in adults, glioblastomas and brain metastases. Key discoveries of this work have helped to establish the new research field of Cancer Neuroscience.
Those include malignant multicellular tumor networks that are highly functional and resistant, driven by
neurodevelopmental factors including pacemaker-like tumor cells in network hubs, and excitatory synapses between brain neurons and various incurable brain tumor entities that fuel brain tumor growth, invasion and metastasis.
Frank Winkler translates his pioneering work in Cancer Neuroscience into novel, neuroscienceinstructed cancer therapies. He has initiated clinical trials that investigate how disconnection of neuro-cancer networks can better control brain tumors in humans.