News

It’s been a bit of a mystery: is a particular family of proteins responsible for cell survival or cell death in the intestinal lining? A new mouse model developed at the Max Delbrück Centre for Molecular Medicine (MDC) provides clear evidence and a potential treatment target for inflammatory bowel disease.

Anton Henssen works as a paediatrician and researches rare tumours at the Max Delbrück Center. Incidentally, he’s also a conceptual artist with way more to his paintings than meets the eye.

Jan Philipp Junker creates cell lineage trees. He wants to understand the different paths that lead to a functioning organism. Perhaps one day, this knowledge will also reveal how organs are able to regenerate.

VRAC/LRRC8 chloride channels do not only play a decisive role in the transport of cytostatics, amino acids and neurotransmitters. They can also transport the important messenger substance cGAMP from cell to cell and thus strengthen the immune response to infections with DNA viruses.

Thomas Blankenstein receives an ERC Advanced grant for cancer research. The scientist wants to find out if T cells control the development of cancer by a process called immunosurveillance. For this purpose he now proposes a new research model.

Researchers at the MDC observe the very early stages of blood vessel development in lymph node tumors. The findings published in Cancer Research suggest a potential treatment target to slow lymphoma tumor growth.

In light of the pandemic, the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) is pooling together its resources for projects that advance the understanding of SARS-CoV-2, while scaling down its regular research operations to a minimum. Here’s an overview of the MDC’s current collaborations and plans.

For the first time ever, researchers are looking at the molecular processes in the cell’s skeleton – the cytoskeleton – from a bird’s eye perspective. These processes are important for cell movement and cell shape formation. In Nature Cell Biology, an MDC team shows how cells coordinate such processes at the right place and time.

A protein in the cell envelope influences the rate of fatty acid uptake in cells. This is reported by MDC researchers in the journal PNAS. This process also appears to be altered in overweight people.

Christian Luft, State Secretary at the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, visited the MDC and the ECRC together with other ministry officials in early March. During his visit, he learned about research in single-cell biology and vascular medicine, as well as about interdisciplinary collaboration with clinicians.