Press Releases

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

A muscle fiber consists of just one cell, but many nuclei. A team at the MDC led by Professor Carmen Birchmeier has now shown just how varied these nuclei are. The study, which has been published in Nature Communications, can help us better understand muscle diseases such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

PhD candidates now have the opportunity to apply for two new training programs. The EU is supporting the program for talented early-stage researchers at the MDC and other European research institutions to the tune of €4 million per network.

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.

A large grant under the NIH’s 4D Nucleome Program supports MDC scientist Ana Pombo’s work as a member of a multi-team consortium led by UC San Diego in the U.S. The team will investigate how DNA organizes inside cell nuclei and functions in space and time.

When virologists become reality TV stars, biologists dream of life without illness, researchers debate organoids vs. animal testing with the general public, and biomedical scientists discuss the possibilities of AI, it can only be Berlin Science Week. This year, the MDC is holding a number of virtual events.

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.

A team at the MDC has answered a question that has puzzled scientists for some 40 years. In the journal Cell, the group explains how cells are able to switch on completely different signaling pathways using only one signaling molecule: the nucleotide cAMP. To achieve this, the molecule is virtually imprisoned in nanometer-sized spaces.

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.