Press Releases

Professor Thomas Willnow wants to find out how the ApoE3 gene variant protects against Alzheimer’s. The MDC group leader has now received €80,000 in funding from the non-profit Alzheimer Forschung Initiative to pursue this research.

MDC scientists conduct excellent research. This includes rigorously following the rules of good scientific practice, ensuring a respectful work environment, and providing young scientists with comprehensive support. Here is the MDC’s statement on current reporting in Spiegel Online.

Our body’s cells are constantly changing. But which of these changes are healthy developments and which lead to serious diseases? This is what LifeTime, a new transnational and interdisciplinary initiative of leading European researchers, aims to discover. The consortium is jointly coordinated by the MDC and the Institut Curie in Paris. It has now cleared an important hurdle.

The U.S. journal Science has chosen single-cell analysis as the Breakthrough of the Year. A major international hot spot for the revolutionary technology is the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) in Berlin. The European consortium LifeTime, which is coordinated from Berlin and Paris, intends to focus on this new approach.

The fatty acid propionate helps defend against the effects of high blood pressure, including atherosclerosis and heart tissue remodeling, a study on mice has found. Gut bacteria produce the substance – which calms the immune cells that drive up blood pressure – from natural dietary fiber.

Chess and cancer research have one thing in common: One must act strategically to defeat the opponent. And that’s exactly what scientists at the MDC are doing. They are seeking to selectively make only those cancer cells aggressive that would otherwise evade chemotherapy – and then lure them into a trap.

Another milestone has been reached: In November 2018, the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) welcomed the 5,000th participant at the MRI center of the German National Cohort (GNC) health study.

The human gut is teeming with billions of beneficial bacteria. Therapies that use antibiotics often destroy most of them. Whether and how the intestinal flora will subsequently recover has been investigated by a research team that included scientists from the MDC. The results have been published in the scientific journal „Nature Microbiology“.

The artist Emilia Tikka spent three months at MDC labs. She was curious about CRISPR and whether genetic reprogramming could enable a “rejuvenation” of human cells in the future. Now, the results of her residency called “AEON – Trajectories of Longevity and CRISPR” are being shown at STATE Studio Berlin.

From October 25 to 27, Berlin will welcome top international researchers whose work has shaped the development of the Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology (BIMSB) at the Max Delbrück Center. They are coming together now to celebrate the MDC research unit’s 10th anniversary and its relocation to Berlin Mitte.