Press Releases

On January 1, 2021, the Berlin Institute of Health (BIH ) has become the translational research unit of Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin and will then form – alongside the hospital and the medical faculty – Charité’s third pillar.

Enlarged ventricles in the brains of people with multiple sclerosis were previously considered a sign of tissue loss. But a team at the MDC and ECRC demonstrated that this expansion often recedes. A study published in JCI Insight now shows that the process observed in mice is transferable to humans.

Hundreds of researchers, clinicians, industry leaders and policy makers from all around Europe are united by a vision of how to revolutionize healthcare. In a perspective in Nature and the LifeTime Strategic Research Agenda they now present a roadmap of how to leverage the latest scientific breakthroughs and technologies over the next decade, to track, understand and treat human cells throughout an individual’s lifetime.

The LabHive digital platform aims to provide necessary resources to diagnostic centres to enable more tests for SARS-CoV-2. Tobias Opialla from the MDC is one of 15 volunteers who has been involved in the project since the #WirvsVirus Hackathon organized by the German government.

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.

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.

To strengthen Berlin’s reputation as an international science hub, the capital’s non-university research institutions have come together to form Berlin Research 50 (BR 50). Together, they want to develop research strategies and foster dialogue between science, politics and society. The initiative will also facilitate and strengthen cooperation with Berlin’s universities.

Scientists at the MDC have discovered stem cells responsible for the most common form of kidney cancer. The team of Walter Birchmeier has found a way to block the growth of these tumors in three models of the disease.

Muscle pain and cramps are common side effects of statins. As an MDC and Charité research group now reports in Scientific Reports, the cholesterol reducers actually influence thousands of genes in muscle cells – thereby hindering cell growth and division.

MDC researchers established a new model to study neuromuscular development and disorders. For the first time two distinct human tissues co-developed in the lab from one progenitor cell type and self-organized into a complex, functional neuromuscular organoid.