Leukemia

The German Research Foundation (DFG) will fund single-cell scientist Simon Haas in its Heisenberg program. Therefore, the Berlin Institute of Health at Charité (BIH) is establishing a Heisenberg professorship in systems hematology. After five years, the BIH will make the professorship permanent.

Combining single-cell data with a self-learning algorithm reveals how structural changes in chromosomes can trigger cancer. This new method could pave the way for personalized cancer treatments, writes a team led by Ashley Sanders in “Nature Biotechnology”.

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.

Armin Rehm and Uta Höpken want to improve our immune defenses against cancer. They have recently shown in human cells what was previously only possible in mouse models. Their findings, published in "Molecular Therapy", have raised the chances of a highly effective immunotherapy being developed for blood cancer.

Simon Haas and his colleagues have traced the development of blood cells in detail – an important step for the diagnosis and therapy of blood cancers. To do this, they combined single-cell analyses with the detection of proteins on the cell surface, they report in "Nature Immunology".

Tumor cells search for niches in tissue where they can grow and multiply. Uta Höpken studies how these cells migrate through the body and interact with other cells in their special niches. Her goal is to use this knowledge to train therapeutic CAR T cells to detect and destroy cancer cells.

MDC researchers have developed a new approach to CAR T-cell therapy. The team has shown in Nature Communications that the procedure is very effective, especially when it comes to fighting follicular lymphomas and chronic lymphocytic leukemia, the most common type of blood cancer in adults.

With its spin-off support program SPOT, the MDC is giving a helping hand to teams looking to start a company. Three of the most promising projects have now been selected. For our series “We at the MDC” we spoke with Dr. Ingo Curdt, coordinator of the funding program.

Certain immune system cells are able to make tumors especially visible to the body’s own defenses – if only cancer cells didn’t prevent them from doing so. Researchers, including those from the MDC and ECRC, have now published a joint article in PNAS explaining how tumors block the immune cells in their immediate environment.

The MDC start-up project “Captain T Cell” has been awarded several million Euros from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) as part of its GO-Bio funding initiative. The aim of the project is to develop new cancer-fighting T-cell therapies.