News

To save the northern white rhinoceros from extinction, the BioRescue team is racing to create lab-grown egg and sperm cells of the critically endangered subspecies. The team has now reported a milestone in “Science Advances”: they have generated primordial germ cells from stem cells – a world’s first.

Algorithms developed at the Max Delbrück Center are able to quickly detect new SARS-CoV-2 variants in wastewater. But that’s not all: the tool, which Altuna Akalin and his colleagues have now presented in “Science of the Total Environment”, can also find other pathogens.

For one night only, the Max Delbrück Center in Berlin-Buch and the MDC-BIMSB in Mitte will open their doors to the interested public: On June 17th, 2023, visitors can tour laboratories, perform hands-on experiments, and explore connections between art and science. Here are some of the highlights.

In neuromuscular diseases, neurons and muscle cells stop communicating properly. Researchers led by Mina Gouti can now model this in 2D in a culture dish. Writing about their findings in “Nature Communications”, they say the new model promises to revolutionize high-throughput drug screening studies.

A CRISPR-based rapid test called CrisprZyme could help general practitioners to diagnose heart attacks and distinguish between different types of prostate cancer. They do not even need a lab, as an international team of scientists – including Michael Kaminski – reports in "Nature Nanotechnology".

From October 25 to 27, Berlin will welcome top international researchers whose work has shaped the development of the Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology (BIMSB) at the Max Delbrück Center. They are coming together now to celebrate the MDC research unit’s 10th anniversary and its relocation to Berlin Mitte.

How can a heart heal itself? And what determines the sex of a living organism? The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded Consolidator Grants to Dr. Jan Philipp Junker and Dr. Darío Lupiáñez to tackle these questions. Each researcher will receive €2 million over five years for their research.

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.”

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.

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.