ERC

The European Research Council awards an ERC Starting Grant to HI-TAC guest researcher Mahak Singhal. He will investigate how the lining of our blood vessels senses, anticipates, and responds to the circadian changes between day and night.

Markus Mittnenzweig of the Max Delbrück Center has been awarded a €1.5 million grant from the European Research Council. He and his team will build dynamic 3D models of how neighboring cells and gene activity guide early-stage embryonic zebrafish cells to become specialized tissues.

Thoralf Niendorf at the Max Delbrück Center has won a Proof of Concept Grant from the European Research Council to study the use of heat generated during MRI scans to selectively destroy brain tumors. The method could pose significantly fewer risks than laser ablation or surgery.

Simon Haas receives a Proof-of-Concept Grant from the European Research Council in the amount of €150,000. Immunotherapies use the immune system to fight against cancer. Haas' team from the joint single-cell focus of Max Delbrück Center, BIH, and Charité is developing methods to predict the efficacy of immunotherapies.

Neuroscientists Gary Lewin and James Poulet at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine have won highly coveted and competitive ERC Advanced Grants to study pain and the neural mechanisms that underlie temperature perception.

Cell-based immunotherapies, particularly lab-produced immune cells known as CAR T cells, show promise in treating various cancers. But how do we produce effective ones? Gaetano Gargiulo from the Max Delbrück Center will develop a novel screening tool, supported by an ERC Proof of Concept Grant.

Whether aggressive cancer cells can spread unchecked depends, to no small degree, on their cellular neighborhood. Fabian Coscia wants to analyze exactly what happens at the proteome level during this interaction. He has now been selected for a €1 million-plus grant from the European Research Council (ERC) to pursue this research.

Organoids have to be fed and cared for continuously so that they can mature. So far, it is mostly a manual process – not suitable for industrial drug screening. Now, the European Research Council (ERC) has awarded Mina Gouti a Proof of Concept Grant to tackle scalability and reproducibility.

They have their sights set on serious diseases: Gabriele G. Schiattarella analyzes mechanisms of heart failure, Simon Haas wants to improve immunotherapies for leukemia and Michael Sigal would like to prevent gastrointestinal diseases. Now, the ERC is awarding the researchers with a Starting Grant.

The contractile and elastic properties of the heart are finely tuned. This is a prerequisite for the cardiac cycle and efficient adaptation. At the MDC, Michael Gotthardt investigates the underlying molecular and biomechanical mechanisms. He is awarded with an ERC Advanced Grant for this work.