Prof. Dr. Dr. Ihsan Ekin Demir

Ekin Demir is a surgeon-scientist at TUM University Hospital whose work bridges pancreatic surgery, cancer neuroscience, pain research and translational oncology. His group investigates how neural signalling shapes pancreatic cancer, neural invasion and pancreatic pain, with the goal of translating mechanistic discoveries into new therapeutic strategies.

His path through medicine led via Heidelberg, Ankara, St. Louis, Worcester and Munich. What stayed constant across those stations is the question of why a disease takes the course it does. In pancreatic cancer that question led to the nerves — to a tissue that plays a far more active role in the tumour than was long assumed.

Since 2021 the Else Kröner Clinician Scientist Professorship has allowed clinical and scientific work to be combined on a planned basis. That structure is the reason an observation at the specimen could grow into a research programme.