ERC grantee wins the 2025 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Professor Görlich's research revealed how nucleoporin proteins create a selective barrier at nuclear pores and how transport factors overcome it. The finding solved a long-standing paradox of how large molecules move efficiently in and out of the nucleus. His discoveries established fundamental principles of intracellular transport and showed that 'disordered' protein regions play essential roles in organising the interior of the cell.

In his ongoing research on structural biology, funded among others with an ERC Synergy Grant, Professor Görlich continues to explore the architecture and dynamics of molecular machines. The aim is to understand muscle function, disease and ageing at near-atomic resolution.

Lasker Awards celebrate researchers who have made major contributions to medical science or who have performed public service on behalf of medicine. To date, five ERC grantees have won this award.

About the ERC

The European Research Council, set up by the European Union in 2007, is the premier European funding organisation for excellent frontier research. It funds creative researchers of any nationality and age, to run projects based across Europe. The ERC offers four core grant schemes: Starting Grants, Consolidator Grants, Advanced Grants and Synergy Grants. With its additional Proof of Concept Grant scheme, the ERC helps grantees to bridge the gap between their pioneering research and early phases of its commercialisation. The ERC is led by an independent governing body, the Scientific Council. Maria Leptin has been the President of the ERC since November 2021. The overall ERC budget from 2021 to 2027 is more than €16 billion, as part of the Horizon Europe programme, which is under the responsibility of Ekaterina Zaharieva, European Commissioner for Startups, Research and Innovation.