News

Research teams at the Max Delbrück Center and its partner institutions used almost 17,000 fewer research animals in 2023 than in the previous year. The Center has now submitted these figures to the Berlin State Office for Health and Social Affairs (LaGeSo).

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.

Their research is outstanding, and they’re also committed to the Max Delbrück Center and engaged in our community — Manqiang Lin and Artsemi Yushkevich wrote the best papers in 2023; Hendrik Bartolomaeus, Eleonore Adami and Ulrike Löber received the Postdoc Awards for 2023.

The German Research Foundation (DFG) will fund single-cell scientist Simon Haas in its Heisenberg program. Therefore, the Berlin Institute of Health at Charité (BIH) is establishing a Heisenberg professorship in systems hematology. After five years, the BIH will make the professorship permanent.

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”.

At a workshop organized by EARA, researchers, animal welfare officers, and communicators gained insights into how they can communicate more openly and proactively about animal research. The event, with over 80 participants, was held in collaboration with the Max Delbrück Center.

The artists Elisabetta Citterio and Claudia Cagliano have created portraits of nearly 60 female researchers from nine countries. Twenty-five of them can be viewed in the "STEM Passion" exhibition until March 12, 2024 in the Rahel Hirsch Center for Translational Medicine Berlin.

Special receptor cells under the skin enable us to feel pain and touch. But Schwann cells also play a key role in detecting such stimuli, researchers at the Max Delbrück Center report in “Nature Communications.” This discovery opens new avenues for pain therapy.

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.

Some hereditary genetic defects cause an exaggerated immune response that can be fatal. Using the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing tool, such defects can be corrected, thus normalizing the immune response, as researchers led by Klaus Rajewsky from the Max Delbrück Center now report in “Science Immunology.”