Press Releases

The Helmholtz Association has approved €30.8 million in funding for the Center for AI–Accelerated Molecular Innovations in Medicine to be located at the Max Delbrück Center. Researchers will use new technologies to develop AI-driven strategies for precision treatment and prevention.

The Long Night of the Sciences turns 25 this year. To mark the anniversary, the Max Delbrück Center at Campus Berlin-Buch will host an exciting line-up of events: including a light show, a reading, lab tours, hands-on experiments, a tour inside an artery, and virtual excursions into the heart.

Online symptom checkers often miss the mark. Can AI do better? Researchers from Altuna Akalin’s team at MDC-BIMSB put large language models to the test – evaluating their ability to guide patients and support doctors. Their study was published in “npj Digital Medicine.”

Data-driven research is crucial for tackling societal challenges. In a collaboration that is so far unique, Berlin's Universities of Excellence, the Max Delbrück Center, and the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin, together with the Zuse Institute Berlin, aim to establish a powerful Data and AI Center.

Researchers led by Maike Sander, Scientific Director of the Max Delbrück Center, have developed a vascularized organoid model of hormone secreting cells in the pancreas. The advance, published in “Developmental Cell,” promises to improve diabetes research and cell-based therapies.

The Max Delbrück Center is a partner in one newly awarded Berlin based Clusters of Excellence: ImmunoPreCept. NeuroCure has also won another round of funding. All researchers are working toward a common goal – to develop therapies that can intercept diseases on a molecular level.

The Helmholtz Institute for Translational AngioCardioScience (HI-TAC) invites attendees to its first Symposium on April 28 and 29, 2025. Researchers from around the world will meet at Heidelberg University to discuss how the heart and blood vessels communicate with the rest of the body to shape health.

Researchers in Nikolaus Rajewsky’s lab at Max Delbrück Center combined high-resolution, single-cell spatial technologies to map a tumor’s cellular neighborhoods in 3D and identify potential targets for personalized cancer therapy. They describe their findings in two separate papers in “Cell Systems.”

The Helmholtz Association is pooling its commitment to prevention research with the launch of the Helmholtz Health Prevention Task Force. In a strategy paper published in “Nature Medicine,“ the committee outlines initial concepts for integrating prevention more effectively into medical practice.

Researchers from Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin and the Max Delbrück Center have detailed the precise mechanism through which the inflammatory signaling molecule IL-12 contributes to Alzheimer’s disease. The study was published in the journal “Nature Aging.”