Healthcare industry

Product testing under real conditions - 11/05/2022

INSPIRE Living Lab: a bridge between industry and the clinic

Coming up with innovative ideas and products in the medical care area is highly relevant not only for the further development of Baden-Württemberg as a health region, but also for improving healthcare itself. However, bridging the gap between industry and the clinic often proves difficult. To drive this process forward, the INSPIRE Living Lab was opened at the University Medical Centre Mannheim in 2021.

Company profile: medicalvalues GmbH - 05/05/2022

medicalvalues – best possible diagnostics thanks to AI

The Karlsruhe-based start-up medicalvalues GmbH wants to use its platform to bring together different clinical data sets and thus enable comprehensive medical diagnostics. Artificial intelligence featuring innovative diagnostic algorithms is used to evaluate the data and generate new insights for laboratories and hospitals.

Certain childhood tumors have an extreme need for amino acids. Scientists at the Hopp Children's Cancer Center Heidelberg (KiTZ), the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), the University of Heidelberg, and HI-STEM* gGmbH have now discovered the molecular mechanisms underlying this and how the cancer cells could be turned off.

Metastatic breast cancer cells abuse macrophages, a type of immune cell, to promote the settlement of cancer metastases in the lungs. The reprogrammed macrophages stimulate blood vessel cells to secrete a cocktail of metastasis-promoting proteins that are part of the so-called metastatic niche.

Peptide-based COVID-19 vaccine - 21/04/2022

CoVac-1: T-cell activator against COVID-19

Current vaccines against COVID-19 aim at forming neutralising antibodies that prevent the virus from penetrating the host cells. Since people with impaired B-cell immune responses – which can also occur in cancer or autoimmune diseases – are not able to do this, researchers at the University of Tübingen have developed the peptide-based T-cell activator CoVac-1, which promises broad and long-term immunity.