News

Neuroscientists Gary Lewin and James Poulet at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine have won highly coveted and competitive ERC Advanced Grants to study pain and the neural mechanisms that underlie temperature perception.

A new computer program allows scientists to design synthetic DNA segments that indicate, in real time, the state of cells. Reported by the Gargiulo lab in “Nature Communications”, it will be used to screen for anti-cancer or viral infections drugs, or to improve gene and cell-based immunotherapies.

From 2024, the Federal Government and the State of Berlin will fund the establishment of the National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT) Berlin. The new site is a cooperation between DKFZ and Charité, BIH, and Max Delbrück Center aimed at closely integrating clinical and translational cancer research.

Simon Haas has been awarded the Lisec-Artz Prize, endowed with €10,000, for his single-cell analysis of communication between stem and immune cells in blood cancer. The University of Bonn Foundation established this prize to honor outstanding early-career cancer researchers.

Sofia Forslund, Friedemann Paul, and Nikolaus Rajewsky are among the Highly Cited Researchers 2023. Each year the company Clarivate compiles a "Who's Who" list of highly influential researchers.

Whether aggressive cancer cells can spread unchecked depends, to no small degree, on their cellular neighborhood. Fabian Coscia wants to analyze exactly what happens at the proteome level during this interaction. He has now been selected for a €1 million-plus grant from the European Research Council (ERC) to pursue this research.

Internationally renowned for pioneering achievements and geared to inter-institutional cooperation: 22 research groups at the Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology in the Max Delbrück Center (MDC-BIMSB) explore how genes regulate life. It is now celebrating its 15th birthday.

Bartter syndrome type 3 is the result of several structural variants in the genome. By using long-read sequencing, Janine Altmüller and her team from the Max Delbrück Center, the BIH and University Hospital Cologne mapped out the rare disease in unprecedented detail. They have now reported their findings in “Genome Medicine.”

Cancer cells are capable of escaping chemotherapy and radiotherapy by activating a signaling pathway that prevents them from dying. Researchers led by Claus Scheidereit at the Max Delbrück Center have now described in Cell Chemical Biology two new compounds that block this escape route.

Some T cells of the immune system are especially sensitive to genetic disturbances within their mitochondrial power plants. Scientists from BIH and Max Delbrück Center have now published their findings in the journal “Nature Genetics”.