Sarcomas in soft tissue usually occur in young people and are difficult to treat. Due to a lack of laboratory models, the causes of their development are poorly understood. A team of researchers has now succeeded in creating mouse models with a functioning immune system that replicate sarcoma types that remain unstudied. The method opens up new avenues for the targeted development of immunotherapies for children and adolescents with sarcomas.

Tübingen achieves remarkable success and has good chance of maintaining its University of Excellence title – Top research in three areas to be sustained from other sources of support.

New treatment methods: DNA origami-based nanodevices precisely control immune response - 24/04/2025

Bottom-up synthetic immunology for novel therapeutic approaches

Modern therapies for combating cancer and infectious diseases increasingly leverage the body’s own immune system. Several research groups at Heidelberg University are using innovative bottom-up approaches in synthetic immunology to develop new treatment methods that can control the immune response more precisely than previously possible.

Germany's most important award for young scientists honors the development of immunotherapies against malignant brain tumors.

Researchers have developed a promising cellular immunotherapy for the treatment of glioblastomas: They equipped T cells with a receptor that recognizes a protein of the brain tumors that is responsible for the dangerous stem cell properties. The therapeutic T cells directed against this target structure were able to specifically destroy human brain tumors in laboratory experiments and in mice.

A research team from Freiburg and Frankfurt has discovered how cells recognise and internally break down waste. The results are relevant for the development of therapies for diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

The Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz-Prize 2025 goes to Prof. Dr Robert Zeiser for his outstanding research in haematology and immunology. Zeiser’s research at the University of Freiburg and the Medical Center – University of Freiburg have led, among other things, to new types of cancer therapy that has increased survival rates and the patients’ quality of life.

NMI spin-off develops theranostics - 02/12/2024

immuneAdvice develops diagnostics to predict the efficacy of immunotherapies

Certain types of cancer are already being effectively treated using immunotherapies, though success rates can vary significantly between patients. Researchers from the Natural and Medical Sciences Institute (NMI) in Reutlingen, along with colleagues at the University of Tübingen, are working on a diagnostic approach to accompany therapy, which would rapidly assess whether the treatment is effective or requires adjustment.

An important enzyme helps the body produce selenium proteins – this discovery could open up new strategies for treating cancer in children. This has been published by scientists from the University of Würzburg, the University Sao Paolo, the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and the Heidelberg Stem Cell Institute HI-STEM*.

Personalized medicine with individually tailored therapies is becoming more a reality in cancer. This requires a look into the genetic material of tumors, a molecular diagnostic tumor profile. A research group from the German Network for Personalized Medicine (DNPM) has recorded the quality standards according to which genome analyses are carried out in Germany. The data is a prerequisite for integrating gene sequencing into routine care.

Knowledge of the target structures for the immune cells is a basic prerequisite for the development of personalized cancer immunotherapies. Scientists from the German Cancer Research Center and the NCT Heidelberg are publishing a sensitive method based on mass spectroscopy to identify such tumor-specific "neoepitopes". The analytical method is designed to detect these low abundance protein fragments and requires minimal amounts of…

Encouraging results from a large international study led by Heidelberg have recently been published in the journal “Lancet”: The genetic material of cancer cells with unknown tissue of origin contains numerous targets for specific drugs that are already available and have been developed to treat other forms of cancer. These suppressed the disease in CUP patients for significantly longer than chemotherapy.

TWYCE GmbH - 10/07/2024

Better immune response against prostate cancer thanks to new bispecific antibodies

TWYCE, a Tübingen-based start-up spun off from the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg and the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Tübingen, is focused on developing a combinatorial therapy using two bispecific antibodies from bench to clinical practice. The founders aim to introduce an effective strategy for combating solid tumours, with initial proof of concept targeted at prostate cancer.

Scientists from the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and Heidelberg University Hospital (UKHD) have shown that the combination of therapeutic immune cells, known as CAR T cells, and a bispecific antibody could improve the treatment of leukaemia. In the culture dish and in mice, they tested CAR-T cells directed against the B-cell marker CD19 in combination with bispecific antibodies that bind to the B-cell-specific protein CD20.

Scientists from the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and the European Bioinformatics Institute EMBL-EBI, Hinxton, UK, are using the Danish health registers to predict individual risks for 20 different types of cancer with a high degree of accuracy. The prediction model can also be transferred to other healthcare systems.

How do tumors react to a certain therapeutic approach? Knowing this before the start of a therapy would be of enormous value for people suffering from cancer as well as for the doctors treating them. Researchers have now made this very observation possible for the CAR-T cell therapy. This allows us to individually investigate how exactly these tumor cells react to the planned therapy.

Activated T cells that carry a certain marker protein on their surface are controlled by natural killer cells. In this way, the body presumably curbs destructive immune reactions. Researchers now discovered that NK cells can impair the effect of cancer therapies with immune checkpoint inhibitors in this way. They could also be responsible for the rapid decline of therapeutic CAR-T cells.

BioMed X and the Universitätsmedizin Mannheim announced today the publication of two manuscripts in the field of cancer immunology in the journal Science Advances. The work is based on a collaboration bet- ween both institutions and researchers at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), the Heidelberg Uni- versity, and the Helmholtz Institute for Translational Oncology (HI-TRON).

CAR-T cell therapy is a last hope for many patients with blood, bone marrow or lymph gland cancer when other treatments are unsuccessful. A limiting factor of this very effective and safe therapy is that the cells used in the process quickly reach a state of exhaustion. Researchers at the University of Freiburg have now been able to prevent this exhaustion and thus significantly improve the effect of the therapy in a preclinical animal model.

Jun.-Prof. Dr. Priscilla Briquez, junior professor at the Department of General and Visceral Surgery at the Freiburg University Medical Center and member of the Medical Faculty at the University of Freiburg, has received a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant from the European Commission. Her DRESSCODE project will receive a total of 1.5 million euros funding for five years.

Epigenetically active drugs enable the cell to read parts of the genome that were previously blocked and inaccessible. This leads to the formation of new mRNA transcripts and also new proteins, as scientists from the German Cancer Research Center and the University Hospital Tübingen have now published. These "therapy-induced epitopes" could help the immune system recognize cancer cells.

Epigenetically active drugs enable the cell to read parts of the genome that were previously blocked and inaccessible. This leads to the formation of new mRNA transcripts and also new proteins, as scientists from the German Cancer Research Center and the University Hospital Tübingen have now published. These "therapy-induced epitopes" could help the immune system recognize cancer cells.

The development of highly specific T-cell engagers directed against pHLA tumor targets will be quick and easy. BioCopy's innovative pHLA screening technology characterizes drug candidates in great depth for their specific binding against the desired pHLA tumor target. YUMAB develops highly specific antibodies with their advanced antibody technologies.

Predicting the success of cancer treatment - 20/06/2023

Focusing on gut microbiome for CAR T-cell therapy

Cancer immunotherapies use the body's own defences to fight tumour cells. An international consortium of researchers from Germany and the USA led by the DKFZ in Heidelberg has demonstrated that the effectiveness of CAR T-cell therapies greatly depends on the composition of the gut microbiome. The researchers have also developed a model for predicting the long-term response to the treatment.

Detecting drug resistance of tumour cells - 25/05/2023

AI-assisted diagnostics declares war on lung cancer

Lung cancer is one of the most common cancers and has a particularly high mortality rate. A significant challenge in treating this disease lies in the resistance of lung tumours to conventional drug therapies, rendering chemotherapy ineffective. There is hope on the horizon as a team of experts from Baden-Württemberg has joined forces to develop an innovative AI-supported test procedure that paves the way for individualised therapy approaches.