From 1973 to 1978, Hartmut Beug was a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institut für Virusforschung (today’s
Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology) in the lab of
Thomas Graf in Tübingen. Beug followed Thomas Graf to the
Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum (DKFZ) in
Heidelberg in 1978 to continue his postdoc, and to the
European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in 1983. He was elected a member of the
European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) the same year. At EMBL, Beug was a staff scientist associated with Thomas Graf’s lab until 1988. In 1988, he became senior scientist at the
Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna. The same year he was awarded the Josef Steiner Cancer Research Foundation prize, jointly with
Mariano Barbacid and Thomas Graf. In 1999, Beug was appointed a professor at the
University of Vienna. He retired from his position at the IMP in 2010 and continued to conduct some research at the faculty of
Veterinary Medicine in Vienna until his death in 2011. Hartmut Beug’s work focussed on different aspects of formation and propagation of cancer. He demonstrated critical roles for
oncogene cooperativity, for example that the distinction between
progenitor cell expansion and maturation relies on cooperation between endogenous signalling and transcription pathways. In the 1970s and 1980s, Beug identified new pairs of oncogenes in avian oncogenic viruses. He was later among the first scientists to propose that the transformation of
hematopoietic cell into cancer cells requires the cooperation of growth factor signaling pathways and the deregulation of transcription. At the IMP, Beug also studied the mechanisms that drive metastasis of
breast cancer cells. He showed how a cooperation of deregulated genes is required for epithelial-mesenchymal transition and metastatic potential of cancer cells. ==Beug Foundation for Metastasis Research==