Max Delbrück Center

Professor Holger Gerhardt from the DZHK partner site Berlin was newly elected to the Board of Directors by the General Assembly: He will take office on 1 July 2024.

On July 8, the Max Delbrück Center and Bruker will kick off a strategic partnership to build a first-of-its-kind innovation hub for systems medicine. The new center will focus on the development and application of mass spectrometry based single-cell and multi-omics technologies.

Through various initiatives, the Max Delbrück Center contributes to an objective debate on animal testing. For the second time, the “Understanding Animal Research” initiative has awarded the center the seal of approval for exemplary communication in experimental animal research.

Berlin researchers and their partners describe how aggressive variants of multiple myeloma can be detected early. Their comprehensive study in “Nature Cancer” shows how changes in genetic material affect the protein profile of the tumor cells, and thus the mechanisms involved in the disease.

Organ-on-a-chip technologies can serve as models of human biology. But they have been limited by the inability to grow them with a vascular system. Bioengineer Professor Milica Radisic will begin a three-year fellowship at the Max Delbrück Center in Berlin-Buch to take on the challenge.

Three Max Delbrück post-docs have won Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowships of €174,000 each. They will study how we perceive wetness, the structure of a mitochondrial protein, and integrate bioelectronics into neuromuscular organoids respectively.

An open-source platform developed by researchers in Nikolaus Rajewsky’s lab at the Max Delbrück Center creates molecular maps from patient tissue samples with subcellular precision, enabling detailed study and potentially enhancing routine clinical pathology. The study was published in “Cell.”

The night of June 22, 2024 was a night of discoveries: Our visitors had the opportunity to dive into the world of biomedical research. They not only had the chance to look over the shoulders of our scientists at work and experiment for themselves, but also to experience the interplay between art and science. Here are some of the highlights of the evening.

This year’s Berlin Institute of Systems Biology of the Max Delbrück Center summer meeting explored “AI’s Adventures in Genomics.” The meeting provided molecular and computational biologists a forum to discuss the latest advances, challenges, and prospects in harnessing AI for biomedical research.