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.

Touch is a fundamental, yet scarcely understood, sense. Now, the team led by Gary Lewin at the Max Delbrück Center has discovered a second ion channel associated with touch perception. Elkin1 could be a target for pain therapy, the team writes in “Science”.

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.

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.

Biochemist and physician Leif S. Ludwig of the Berlin Institute of Health at Charité (BIH) and the Max Delbrück Center has been named a recipient of the 2023 Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize, as the German Research Foundation (DFG) announced on June 27th.

Regulatory T cells ensure that immune responses happen in a controlled way. But eating too much salt weakens these cells’ energy supply, thus rendering them dysfunctional for a while. This may have implications for autoimmunity, an international team – including Dominik Müller – reports in “Cell Metabolism.”

Leif S. Ludwig, a researcher at the Max Delbrück Center and the Berlin Institute of Health at Charité (BIH), will receive the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Young Investigator Award 2023 for a new method to analyze the formation of blood cells, as the Scientific Council of the Paul Ehrlich Foundation announced today.

Organoids have to be fed and cared for continuously so that they can mature. So far, it is mostly a manual process – not suitable for industrial drug screening. Now, the European Research Council (ERC) has awarded Mina Gouti a Proof of Concept Grant to tackle scalability and reproducibility.