The bacterium Staphylococcus epidermidisis primarily a harmless microbe found on the skin and in the noses of humans. Yet some strains of this species can cause infections – in catheters, artificial joints, heart valves, and in the bloodstream – which are difficult to treat. These bacteria are often resistant to a particularly effective antibiotic, methicillin, and are among the most feared germs in hospitals.

Digitalisation - 04/08/2021

Eye check for all - quick and easy thanks to artificial intelligence

Many eye diseases are already easily treatable, if they are detected in time. But waiting months for an ophthalmologist’s appointment seems to be the norm - that is, if you can get to see a specialist at all. The Tübingen-based start-up eye2you wants to improve this situation: it has developed a mobile retinal examination device involving a smartphone and AI. It can be used by family doctors, diabetologists and nursing staff and thus help to…

Workplace of the future - 10/08/2021

Intelligent body support system for surgery staff

Operating room staff often spend hours in strenuous postures, which has a significant impact on concentration and quality of work. While operating room equipment is increasingly networked, state-of-the-art medical technology, conditions for operating room staff trail way behind. The start-up company Hellstern medical offers an effective solution for serious pain, fatigue and incorrect interventions.

The risk of colorectal cancer can be predicted more accurately by determining seven blood-based micro-RNAs (miRNAs) than by using traditional methods - and can be done so many years before a diagnosis is made. In a current study, researchers from the German Cancer Research Center and the National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT) Heidelberg show that miRNA profiles provide greater predictive accuracy than genetic or lifestyle-based risk…

Scientists from the German Cancer Research Center and Heidelberg University Hospital have for the first time been able to delay the development of hereditary colorectal cancer with a protective vaccination. Mice with a hereditary predisposition to colorectal cancer survived significantly longer after vaccination than unvaccinated animals. Combining the vaccination with an anti-inflammatory drug increased the protective effect.

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the commonest cause of blindness in developed countries affecting seven million in total in Germany, from which 500,000 people are suffering from late stage disease, around half of whom are registered as visually impaired. There are two forms of AMD, ‘wet’ and ‘dry’. There are currently no treatments available for the dry form of the disease (geographic atrophy).

Under certain conditions, our immune system can efficiently fight off infectious diseases and cancer. T cells, especially the gamma delta T cell type, play an important role in this. The issue is that this cell type is extremely infrequent in the human body. Researchers at the University Hospital Tübingen, the University of Heidelberg and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) have now succeeded in finding the cause for the formation of…

Scientists from the EMBL and the German Cancer Research Center have presented a new method for generating metabolic profiles of individual cells. The method, which combines fluorescence microscopy and a specific form of mass spectroscopy, can analyze over a hundred metabolites and lipids from more than a thousand individual cells per hour. Researchers expect the method to better answer a variety of biomedical questions in the future.

Through a complex, self-reinforcing feedback mechanism, colorectal cancer cells make room for their own expansion by driving surrounding healthy intestinal cells to death - while simultaneously fueling their own growth. This feedback loop is driven by an activator of the innate immune system. Researchers from the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and the University of Heidelberg discovered this mechanism in the intestinal tissue of fruit…

To diagnose an infection with the coronavirus, usually a throat swab is taken and genetic viral material detected by using a highly sensitive PCR. To date, more than 65 million of these tests have been performed in Germany alone. Due to the massive increase in testing worldwide and simultaneous loss of production, there was a significant shortage of test materials in the early stage of the pandemic.

PixelBiotech GmbH - 27/07/2021

Searching for tracks with cytogenetics and AI

The startup Pixelbiotech combines fluorescence techniques with artificial intelligence to detect DNA and RNA in medical samples. HuluFISH is the name of the method, which allows for countless applications - from detecting viral infections, such as COVID-19 or African swine fever virus, to the quality control of gene and immunotherapeutic procedures in cancer medicine.

3R-Center - 18/08/2021

Putting alternatives to animal testing into practice

Animal experiments are still central to biomedical research. However, it has become increasingly clear that not all of them are absolutely necessary. Alternative techniques exist. The new 3R-Netzwerk Baden-Württemberg is now seeking to promote these more vigorously - and improve animal welfare in cases where alternatives to animal testing are not available.

As a dominant part of southern Germany’s life-science industry hub, Heidelberg will soon have a life-science startup incubator of its own. BioLabs, the premier US network of managed co-working lab space, will open its first German branch in the Heidelberg Innovation Park (hip). On August 16, representatives of city and state governments, BioLabs and the life-science industry celebrated the Heidelberg BioLabs groundbreaking.

New drugs are intended to help stop viral zoonoses – infections that jump from animals to humans. To study suitable inhibitors, Prof. Dr Christian Klein from the Institute of Pharmacy and Molecular Biotechnology (IPMB) of Heidelberg University is receiving funding in the amount of 450,000 euros from the Volkswagen Foundation.

Christiane Opitz, scientist at the German Cancer Research Center, is being awarded this year's Ita Askonas Prize of the European Federation of Immunological Societies. Opitz has discovered how tumor cells use certain metabolites to protect themselves against the immune system. Her research findings may provide important clues for the development of new therapeutic concepts.

On the one hand, blood vessels supply tumors with nutrients and, on the other, enable cancer cells to spread throughout the body. The settlement of circulating tumor cells in a distant organ is promoted by factors whose production is induced by the primary tumor itself. Scientists have now identified a new growth factor produced by blood vessels that enables tumor cells to metastatically colonize organs.

Scientists use super-resolution microscopy to study previously undiscovered cellular worlds, revealing nanometer-scale details inside cells. This method revolutionized light microscopy and earned its inventors the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In an international collaboration, AI researchers from Tübingen have now developed an algorithm that significantly accelerates this technology.

CureVac N.V. (Nasdaq: CVAC), a global biopharmaceutical company developing a new class of transformative medicines based on messenger ribonucleic acid (“mRNA”), today announced the publication entitled “Therapeutic HNF4A mRNA attenuates liver fibrosis in a preclinical model” in the peer-reviewed Journal of Hepatology.

Optimised peptides against infections and cancer - 07/10/2021

New bioactive ingredients from the peptidome treasure chest

Peptides are increasingly coming into scientific focus for application in diagnostics and therapy. The human body is full of these protein fragments, but only a fraction have been characterised. So there is enormous potential for discovering new biologically active substances that can help in the fight against bacteria, viruses and cancer. A collaborative research centre at Ulm University Hospital is on the trail of these promising fragments.

Expert interview - 31/08/2021

Health Data Scenarios - many possibilities for the future?

The digitization of healthcare is progressing slowly but steadily. In addition to simple telemedical applications, data such as electronic patient records are forming the basis of digitization. The ‘Health Data Scenarios’ project aims to model the future of healthcare data by using scenarios. Lucas Scherdel, Healthcare Innovation Director at DayOne, and Dr. Alexander Fink, founder and CEO of ScMI AG, explain how this will work.

Personalised medicine - 16/09/2021

Pharmacogenomics enables individualised drug prescription

Every person is unique, and their reaction to medications can be just as individual. For this reason, unexpected side effects occur time and again with common drugs, sometimes with life-threatening consequences. At the Dr. Margarete Fischer-Bosch Institute for Clinical Pharmacology (IKP) in Stuttgart, the influence of hereditary factors on these harmful reactions is being investigated in order to enable individualised therapies.

EMBL scientists pave the way for reducing the harmful side effects antibiotics have on gut bacteria. Antibiotics help us to treat bacterial infections and save millions of lives each year. But they can also harm the helpful microbes residing in our gut, weakening one of our body’s first lines of defence against pathogens and compromising the multiple beneficial effects our microbiota has for our health.

Cyber Valley researchers have created medical educational tools that could potentially train the surgeons of the future, much like flight simulators train pilots. The team developed a range of artificial organ phantoms to serve as training platforms for surgeons. Thanks to the structured data of experienced medical professionals, a quantitative and objective assessment of a trainee’s skills can be assessed in real time.

A pioneering technique developed by the Prevedel Group at EMBL allows neuroscientists to observe live neurons deep inside the brain – or any other cell hidden within an opaque tissue. The technique is based on two state-of-the-art microscopy methods, three-photon microscopy and adaptive optics. The paper reporting on this advancement was published on 30th September 2021 in Nature Methods.

International research collaboration explores the properties of different neuron types in the brain motor cortex of mice, monkeys and humans using novel experimental and data analysis techniques.