Gunter von Minckwitz

Gunter von Minckwitz, MD, PhD is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the German Breast Group (GBG), one of Europe's most prolific breast cancer clinical trial organizations. He is a world leader in neoadjuvant breast cancer research and the clinical use of pathologic complete response (pCR) as a surrogate endpoint and decision-making tool. He was a key co-investigator and steering committee member for the KATHERINE trial (BO27938), published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2019, which demonstrated that T-DM1 (trastuzumab emtansine) significantly improved invasive disease-free survival compared with trastuzumab in HER2-positive early breast cancer patients who had residual invasive disease after neoadjuvant therapy. This post-neoadjuvant adaptive strategy based on pCR response became the new standard of care and transformed adjuvant treatment decision-making. Beyond KATHERINE, Professor von Minckwitz has designed and executed a series of GBG neoadjuvant platform trials—including GeparTrio, GeparQuinto, GeparSixto, GeparSepto, and GeparOcto—that have collectively enrolled over 10,000 patients and established evidence-based standards for carboplatin in TNBC, pertuzumab in HER2+ disease, and olaparib in BRCA-mutated tumors. He has also contributed foundational meta-analyses to the CTNeoBC meta-analysis consortium examining pCR as a surrogate for long-term outcomes. With over 350 peer-reviewed publications and an H-index exceeding 70, Professor von Minckwitz is one of the most cited breast oncologists in the world.