Max Delbrück Center MDC - Max-Delbrück-Centrum für molekulare Medizin in der Helmholtz-Gemeinschaft

Our Research

Research at the Max Delbrück Center aims to elucidate the molecular mechanisms of health and disease, and translate those findings into medical practice.

wires

Data Science and Artificial Intelligence

Enabling multi-modal prediction from molecules to cohorts.

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Research Highlights

Our research teams publish around 450 specialist articles every year. Our research highlights can be found here, presented in a comprehensible format.

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Selection of research highlights
induced pluripotent stem cells in a pluripotency test

Research News & Events

Sequenziergerät
Science

Max Delbrück Center to host Helmholtz Drug Discovery meeting

Top scientists and companies will meet in Berlin-Buch for the 2025 Helmholtz Drug Discovery Conference from April 28-30 to discuss RNA drugs, PROTACs, AI in drug discovery, and chemoproteomics and to form new collaborations.
zebrafish
Institute & Campus

Lab animal report for 2024

Research teams at the Max Delbrück Center and its partner institutions used a total of 31,517 animals in experiments in 2024 – almost 6,000 fewer than the previous year. These figures were reported to the Berlin State Office for Health and Social Affairs (LaGeSo).
Girls in a lab
Science

Data science? Absolutely!

How does research actually work? What do data scientists and animal caretakers do? This year, 17 girls visited the Max Delbrück Center for Girls' Day – and five boys took part in Boys' Day.
microscopic image

How the heart and blood vessels influence organs

The Helmholtz Institute for Translational AngioCardioScience (HI-TAC) invites attendees to its first Symposium on April 28 and 29, 2025. Researchers from around the world will meet at Heidelberg University to discuss how the heart and blood vessels communicate with the rest of the body to shape health.
3D molecular reconstruction of a lung tumor

Towards understanding tumors in 3D

Researchers in Nikolaus Rajewsky’s lab at Max Delbrück Center combined high-resolution, single-cell spatial technologies to map a tumor’s cellular neighborhoods in 3D and identify potential targets for personalized cancer therapy. They describe their findings in two separate papers in “Cell Systems.”
Scientific image
Science

Gut microbiome reveals risk of organ rejection

A team of researchers in the lab of Dr. Nicola Wilck at the Experimental and Clinical Research Center in Berlin have found that changes in gut microbes can indicate that the body may reject a transplanted kidney. The study was published in the “American Journal of Transplantation.”
Peter M. Schlag
Institute & Campus

In memory of Professor Peter M. Schlag

The Max Delbrück Center mourns the loss of Professor Peter M. Schlag (1948–2025). He was a pioneer of cancer research and a passionate physician. Schlag worked as a group leader at our research center for more than two decades.
Scientific image
Science

Unraveling cell polarity with the help of AI

Max Delbrück Center and Helmholtz Imaging scientists have developed open-source software that simplifies the study of cell polarity with fluorescence microscopy. Published in “Nature Communications,” the innovation may streamline research on many basic biological processes such as tissue repair.

All News & Events

Publications

Mucosal washes are useful for sampling intestinal mucus-associated microbiota despite low biomass

Gut Microbes

Epigenetic mechanisms underlying the beneficial effects of cardiac rehabilitation. An overview from the working groups of "cellular and molecular biology of the heart" and "cardiac rehabilitation and cardiovascular prevention" of the Italian Society of …

Int J Cardiol

Assessing reliability and comparability of 4D flow CMR whole heart measurements using retrospective valve tracking: a single-vendor study in the Berlin Research Network

Magn Reson Imaging

Comprehensive analysis of B cell repopulation in ocrelizumab-treated patients with multiple sclerosis by mass cytometry and proteomics

iScience

All Publications