Bernd Groner is the head of the Georg Speyer Haus, an independent biomedical research institute in Frankfurt am Main (Germany). He studied biochemistry at the University of Pittsburgh (USA) and did postdoctoral work at Columbia University in New York, the Max-Planck-Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin, and the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research in Lausanne. From 1993 to 1998, he served as Director of the Institute for Experimental Cancer Research in Freiburg (Germany), before taking up his current post at the Georg Speyer Haus. He is a widely recognized authority on peptide hormones and has pioneered the design of peptides as pharmacological modulators of cell signaling.