Cancer

The Simon Haas lab and researchers from Heidelberg Faculty of Medicine at Heidelberg University have identified a subgroup of CAR T cells that plays a key role in the success of low-dose therapies and that could potentially serve as a biomarker. The findings are published in “Nature Communications.”

A team headed by Michael Sigal’s lab has revealed how Helicobacter pylori reprograms the stomach lining at the cellular level, allowing cancer to develop. The findings, published “Nature Communications,” pave the way toward prevention.

Bringing a new CAR-T cell therapy from promising results in the lab to critically ill cancer patients is anything but straightforward. A Tagesspiegel podcast featuring, among others, Armin Rehm explores the hurdles that must be overcome along the way and why the process is often faster in the United States.

Uwe Ohler and Gaetano Gargiulo have been awarded prestigious ERC Advanced Grants. With funding of €2.5 million each, they will spend the next five years investigating how protein synthesis is regulated and identifying vulnerabilities in pediatric brain tumors.

Researchers at the Max Delbrück Center have found a way to improve CAR-T cancer therapy to treat lymphoma. By additionally engineering the cells to express the receptor CCR7, they show in “Cancer Immunology Research” that the CAR-T cells penetrate lymph nodes more efficiently and kill cancer cells quickly.

In aggressive lymphomas, inflammatory messengers reprogram the “conductors” of the immune system, causing lymph node structure to collapse. A team led by Simon Haas describes in “Nature Cancer” this process for the first time using single-cell and spatial analyses.

Checkpoint inhibitors help fight cancer but increase the risk of heart disease. An interdisciplinary team, including researchers from the Max Delbrück Center, is investigating how the therapy can be made safer. The Hector Foundation is supporting the project with €1.3 million.

Helmholtz-funded projects highlight a new focus at the Max Delbrück Center on biomedical engineering. By combining biomedicine, artificial intelligence, and engineering, basic research can be more quickly translated into therapies.

MRI scans often struggle to capture clear images of deep or delicate tissues. Researchers at the Max Delbrück Center now report in “Advanced Materials” a new lightweight antenna that boosts image quality and may shorten scan times ¬– without changing existing MRI machines.

This year, the Pre-GoBio program is supporting two planned spin-offs. Paul Schöpe aims to bring a drug targeting colorectal cancer metastases to market. And Ines Lahmann will further develop NMJCare, a model that can be used to test therapies for neuromuscular diseases.