Vladimir Katanaev is born in Siberia and is a graduate of Krasnoyarsk State University and Pushchino branch of Moscow State University, Russia. He received his PhD in 2000 from the Institute of Biochemistry, University of Fribourg (Switzerland), working on signal transduction in leukocyte chemotaxis. From 2000 to 2005, he worked as postdoctoral research fellow and subsequently as associate research scientist at the Department of Genetics and Development of Columbia University, New York (USA). There he started his research on the Wnt/Frizzled signaling in Drosophila development. He continued to study this signaling cascade in Drosophila and mammalian cells as an independent group leader at the University of Konstanz (Germany), where he also completed his Habilitation in 2010. He joined the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology of the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) in April 2011 as Associate Professor, relocating his laboratory from Konstanz to Lausanne. There, his research focused on signal transduction in normal and pathologic cell states, breast cancer being the main topic regarding the latter. Uniting fundamental and translational studies, Vladimir Katanaev has identified several promising drug candidates targeting oncogenic signaling pathways. In October 2018, he joined the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Geneva (Switzerland), where he was appointed as a Full Professor and Chair in the Translational Research Centre in Oncohaematology and at the Department of Cell Physiology and Metabolism. In parallel to his professorial activities in Europe, Vladimir Katanaev run secondary laboratories in his home country of Russia: from 2008 to 2013 as Head of the Developmental Genetics Group, Institute of Protein Research, Russian Academy of Sciences, Pushchino, and from 2015 till present – as Head of the Natural Products Drug Discovery Laboratory, School of Biomedicine, Far Eastern Federal University, Vladivostok.