Prof. Dr. Timo Mueller

Timo Müller studied Animal Physiology at the Philipps-University Marburg, Germany. In 2009, he received his PhD at the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. He then moved on to work as a postdoctoral fellow at the Metabolic Disease Institute, University of Cincinnati, USA. In 2011, Timo Müller returned to Germany, where he ever since leads the Division of Molecular Pharmacology at the Institute for Diabetes and Obesity (IDO), Helmholtz Munich. In November 2023, Timo Müller was appointed Director of the Institute for Diabetes and Obesity. Since February 2024, Timo Müller holds a full professorship (W3) at the Walther-Straub Institute for Pharmacology and Toxicology, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (LMU), Germany.

In 2019, he received the Venia legendi for experimental pharmacology from the Medical Faculty at the University of Tübingen, Germany. Timo Müllers research is focused on the development and evaluation of novel unimolecular pharmacotherapies to treat the metabolic syndrome, and in particular obesity and diabetes. He is part of an international team of scientists who pioneered the concept of GLP-1-based dual-and triple-agonists for the treatment of obesity and diabetes.

He published >140 manuscripts, including articles in Cell, Cell Metabolism, Nature Medicine, Nature Metabolism, and Nature Communications. As postdoctoral fellow, he discovered that that adipose-specific loss of p62 leads to extreme obesity in mice (Müller et al., J Clin Invest 2013) and identified GPR83 as a regulator of energy metabolism (Müller et al., Nat Commun 2013). He established the concept of glucagon-mediated hepatic delivery of T3 to enhance lipid and cholesterol metabolism (Finan et al. Cell 2016) and showed GLP-1-mediated delivery of oestrogen to restore beta-cell mass in diabetic mice (Sachs et al. Nat Metab 2020).

Timo Müller refuted the concept that alternatively activated macrophages regulate adaptive thermogenesis (Fischer et al., Nat Med 2017), identified the signal mechanism of how p62 regulates energy metabolism (Fischer et al., Nat Commun 2020) and identified the CNS GIP receptor as a key regulator of body weight (Zhang et al., Cell Metab 2021). He also published two of the most cited manuscripts of Molecular Metabolism (Müller et al., Mol Metab 2015 and Müller et al., Mol Metab 2019).

Gut Hormones GLP-1 GIPGlucagonEndocrinologyObesityDiabetesEnergy Metabolism