Dr. med. Johannes Atta

Managing Director, Qualified Person (QP) and Responsible Person (VerP), ANOVA Institute for Regenerative Medicine

Specialist in Internal Medicine – Haematology, Oncology and Infectious Diseases

Academic haematologist and oncologist – the evidentiary discipline of leukaemia medicine, brought to the frontier of cell-based therapy.

Johannes Atta came to medicine by way of the humanities, and never entirely left them behind. He studied medicine at the universities of Würzburg and Frankfurt and, alongside it, philosophy and classical philology, with periods of study at the University of Western Australia and at Harvard Medical School in Boston. It is an unusual formation for an oncologist, and it shows in how he practises: in the willingness to sit with a difficult question rather than resolve it prematurely, and in the care he takes over what is actually known as against what is merely assumed.

His clinical training took place in one of the most demanding environments in European haematology. As a research fellow at Medical Clinic III of Frankfurt University Hospital, under Professor Dieter Hoelzer, he worked in the field of adult acute lymphoblastic leukaemia – a disease in which survival is won not by inspiration but by protocol discipline, precise risk stratification and the measurement of residual disease down to the last detectable cell. His own research from that period addressed the purging of BCR-ABL-positive leukaemic cells from stem cell grafts by immunomagnetic separation, and he contributed to the German multicentre trials that established treatment standards for adult ALL still in use today.

He went on to senior hospital appointments as consultant (Oberarzt) in the Department of Haematology and Oncology at the University of Giessen under Professor Mathias Rummel, and at Medical Clinic II of Frankfurt University Hospital under Professor Hubert Serve. For several years he also held a professorship at the Goethe University Frankfurt. He is a board-certified specialist in internal medicine with additional qualifications in haematology and oncology, in infectious diseases, and in medical quality management – a combination that matters more in cell-based therapy than it may at first appear, since patients receiving such treatments are often immunologically vulnerable and the margin for infectious complication is narrow.

He directed the Tumour Therapy Centre at the Institute for Diagnostic Imaging in Offenbach and was clinical head of the unit for the manufacture and administration of mesenchymal stem cells (MSC) established there under his supervision – work that stands in direct continuity with what ANOVA does today. At ANOVA he is a Managing Director, Qualified Person (GMP) and Responsible Person (Sections 20b and 20c AMG) as well as releasing physician for substances of human origin (SOHO), and advises the institute as a consultant.

His role is, in effect, that of the institute's clinical conscience. Regenerative and experimental medicine attracts hope, and hope is not always a reliable guide to evidence; an oncologist trained in a discipline where every claim must be defended against a controlled trial is precisely the right person to hold that line. Patients who come to ANOVA with a cancer diagnosis meet in him a physician who has spent a career at the difficult end of oncology, and who will tell them plainly what a treatment can and cannot be expected to do.