In 2002, after completing my Abitur and civilian service, I began studying biochemistry – though I still can’t fully explain why biochemistry. A fortunate coincidence led me to the University of Greifswald, where I first got into contact with omics approaches for studying living systems. Lectures by Prof. Michael Hecker, a pioneer in applying omics technologies to understand bacterial physiology, sparked my curiosity and interest in these data-rich, comprehensive approaches to study biological systems. Around the same time, the first drafts of the human genome were released, and genome sequencing became routine. At the dawn of the genome age, I became fascinated by proteins instead – those dynamic and multifaceted key “players of life”. I conducted my first mass spectrometry-based proteomics experiments in Prof. Michael Hecker’s laboratory at a time when 2D gel electrophoresis was still the norm and completed my diploma thesis on quantitative proteomics of membrane proteins in 2007.
After another year of research in Greifswald, I embarked on a PhD project with Prof. Bernhard Küster at the TU München (TUM), who would later become one of my co-founders of OmicScouts. The project focused on new tools for analyzing the poorly understood and understudied posttranslational modification O-GlcNAc. When I joined in 2008, the lab’s first mass spectrometer was just being installed, and we built scientific and technological infrastructure over the years from scratch that laid the foundation for the world-class proteomics laboratory it is now.
After my PhD in 2012, I stayed with Bernhard to pursue a new challenge: identifying which human genes are expressed as proteins. Together with Mathias Wilhelm – then a PhD student and later my second co-founder – and others, we collaborated with academic and industry partners, including the German software giant SAP, to create the first mass spectrometry-based draft of the human proteome. This effort also led to the development of ProteomicsDB, a high-performance, in-memory database for real-time proteomics data analysis. The results of this work were published in Nature in 2014, and ProteomicsDB remains a widely used resource in the field.
At the same time, we also worked with a major pharmaceutical company on assessing methods for label-free target deconvolution. As interest grew from pharma companies, Bernhard, Mathias, and I took the leap to spin out from TUM. OmicScouts was born with the mission to build out a comprehensive chemoproteomics platform, integrating quantitative mass spectrometry, bioinformatics, biochemistry and cell biology to support drug discovery.
We launched operations in TUM labs in 2014 and moved to our own facility in Freising in 2017. We financed our first instruments with bank loans and bootstrapped the rest. Over the next decade, we expanded our service portfolio and became trusted proteomics partner for leading global biopharma companies.
In early 2024, we met the team at Momentum through Care Equity, who I had met the prior year at a conference. We quickly realized our shared vision: accelerating drug discovery through our complementary strengths in high-throughput screening and chemoproteomics. Together, we now offer a unique integrated small molecule discovery engine – from target ID through high-throughput screening to cellular and ultimately ex vivo pharmacodynamic studies.
From my first proteomics experiments to today, I remain deeply fascinated by the ability to analyze protein properties and functions across entire biological systems. With the field’s advances in concepts, methods, instrumentation and data processing and analysis, it becomes ever easier to uncover actionable insights that go far beyond “boring lists of boring proteins.”
Hannes Hahne is not an investor with Care Equity and is not being compensated for sharing his opinion about Care Equity or any member of the Care Equity team. Care Equity has invested in a company led by Hannes Hahne, which creates a conflict of interest. Hannes Hahne’s opinion may not be representative of any other person’s experience with Care Equity or any member of the Care Equity team.