Prof Dr Dr Torsten Haferlach is one of the world’s leading experts in the field of leukemia; engaging in ground breaking research, the development of new diagnostic  tools as well as the link to treatment options, he has always been pushing its boundaries of his chosen field.

With an MD in medicine as well as a PhD in Germanistics, and a habilitation that already sets standards in the leukemia diagnostic  field, he spent the first part of his career as a medical doctor and hematologist, first at the university clinics in Kiel and Göttingen then at the university clinic in Munich where he acted as both the senior physician at the Department of Internal Medicine and the Head of the laboratory for leukaemia diagnostics.

In 2005 he set up the Munich Leukemia Laboratory (www.mll.com) together with three colleagues from complementary disciplines. Today the lab processes with a team of 204 employees over 90,000 blood or bone marrow samples per year, his practice treats more than 4,500 patients, and he is one of the major contributors to knowledge in this area: well over 550 articles have been published in top ranking, peer-reviewed medical journals since the lab’s inception.

Prof Haferlach himself has authored and co-authored more than 550 articles over the course of his career. He is constantly contributing to the evaluation and dissemination of scientific knowledge in his chosen field: as reviewer of leading journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, Blood, Leukemia, Haematologica and The Lancet Haematology, as member of editorial boards for journals such as Leukemia, Annals of Hematology, and Leukemia Research, as sought-after speaker on medical conferences around the world, and by serving on the advisory boards of companies such as Illumina, Novartis, Pfizer and Gilead.