Angelika Riemer

Angelika Riemer is heading the Division of Immunotherapy and Immunoprevention at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg. She studied medicine and molecular biology at the University of Vienna (Austria), Monash University in Melbourne (Australia) and University of Bristol (UK), and received her MD degree in 2002 and her PhD degree in 2005. In 2008/2009, she did a postdoctoral fellowship at the Cancer Vaccine Center of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School (Boston, USA), and moved to Heidelberg in 2010. She is a board-certified Clinical Immunologist and Dermatologist, and holds a venia legendi (approx. Associate Professorship) in Immunology.

Her scientific work focuses on the development of a therapeutic HPV vaccine based on validated target T cell epitopes. This validation step is provided by mass spectrometry-based direct proof of a peptide being HLA-presented on a tumor cell’s surface, as well as immunogenicity assessment. The group has further developed orthotopic HPV-dependent tumor models in MHC-humanized mouse strains to allow preclinical efficacy testing of candidate therapeutic HPV vaccine formulations.

The epitope validation pipeline developed for low-abundance viral epitopes is now also widely applied for tumor antigen/neoepitope characterization.

Dr. Riemer is a member of the Extended Directorate of the National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT) Heidelberg, and co-coordinates the NCT program Immunotherapy. She is also part of the German Center for Infection Research (DZIF), where she co-coordinates the research area Infections of the Immunocompromised Host, and is deputy site speaker for the DZIF partner site Heidelberg. Further, she is a member of the expert steering group of the DZIF Bridging Topic “Vaccines”. As of summer 2026, Angelika Riemer is one of the two speakers of the DGfI study group Vaccines.