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.

The European Research Council (ERC) awarded Dr. Mina Gouti a €2.8 million Consolidator Grant to further develop miniature neuromuscular organoids for studying neuromuscular development and diseases. It was the second honor in as many weeks; she was also named an EMBO Young Investigator for her work.

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.

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 new algorithmic approach reveals individual tumors continue to evolve and remodel their genomes, and this occurs across a broad range of tumor types. Identifying changes that benefit tumors and help them metastasize could help with future treatments. Results are published in Nature.

MDC researchers received a $150,000 pilot project grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s Neurodegeneration Challenge Network to investigate a defining feature of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

The Berlin biotech start-up T-knife, a spin-off from the MDC together with Charité, has secured investments totaling €66 million. Four venture capital funds committed to the financing in early August. T-knife develops new cancer treatments using modified immune system T cells.

A severe course of COVID-19 does not solely result in a strong immune reaction – rather, the immune response is caught in a continuous loop of activation and inhibition. This is reported in Cell by experts of the nationwide deCOI research network, including colleagues at the MDC.