News

Its official description, a “specialized science library serving the staff of the MDC,” sounds as dry as a dusty bookshelf. What else does the MDC library have to offer? We answer that question in an interview with Wolf Schröder-Barkausen, in another installment of our series “We at the MDC.”

Neuroscience is one of Berlin’s strongest fields of research. The Berlin Brains lecture series at Urania shows the breadth and depth of this research expertise in the capital city – this year under the theme “Junior Meets Senior.” The MDC’s Thomas Willnow and Anna Löwa are kicking off the series.

Theoretical physicists from Berlin teamed up with experimental physicists from Munich to determine the precise mechanics involved in cell motility. The findings were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The HIDA Trainee Network is back for a second time in 2021. The exchange program promotes interdisciplinary networking between young scientists at Helmholtz and helps them learn from one another

The 56th edition of the “Jugend forscht” competition will soon kick off under the theme “Lass Zukunft da.” The MDC is for the first time co-sponsoring the search for tomorrow’s scientists – this year to be held fully virtual. The young researchers apparently don’t mind the new format: almost 9,000 children and young people have signed up for the competition so far.

In December 2020, biophysicist Melissa Birol joined the MDC as a new junior group leader to investigate the behavior and function of disordered proteins in brain cells.

MDC researchers have developed a new approach to CAR T-cell therapy. The team has shown in Nature Communications that the procedure is very effective, especially when it comes to fighting follicular lymphomas and chronic lymphocytic leukemia, the most common type of blood cancer in adults.

In the lab, Jan Philipp Junker is working on cell lineages. He is trying to understand how zebrafish repair their own hearts. In his spare time, he likes to read a lot. For our series "What are you reading right now?", the systems biologist takes us to the East Coast of the USA, to Boston. Not to the MIT, but to a milieu of tennis players and drug addicts.

On January 1, 2021, the Berlin Institute of Health (BIH ) has become the translational research unit of Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin and will then form – alongside the hospital and the medical faculty – Charité’s third pillar.

Bone regeneration, dynamic hydrogels and the novel coronavirus – these three topics are currently being researched by MDC scientists in two new Collaborative Research Centres and as part of the COVID-19 Focus Funding initiative of the German Research Foundation (DFG ).