• HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
  • CONTACT US
Tuesday, January 31, 2023
BIOENGINEER.ORG
No Result
View All Result
  • Login
  • HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
        • Lecturer
        • PhD Studentship
        • Postdoc
        • Research Assistant
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
  • CONTACT US
  • HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
        • Lecturer
        • PhD Studentship
        • Postdoc
        • Research Assistant
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
  • CONTACT US
No Result
View All Result
Bioengineer.org
No Result
View All Result
Home NEWS Science News Health

Pioneering method for stem cell diagnostics: Leif S. Ludwig receives Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Early Career Award

Bioengineer by Bioengineer
January 24, 2023
in Health
Reading Time: 5 mins read
0
Share on FacebookShare on TwitterShare on LinkedinShare on RedditShare on Telegram

FRANKFURT. Our blood renews itself constantly. Each second, millions of new cells are added to our bloodstream which replace dying blood cells. They originate from haematopoietic (blood-forming) stem cells in the bone marrow and then gradually mature over several stages. A distinction is traditionally made between four major developmental trajectories: the first trajectory produces the red blood cells that transport oxygen, the second supplies the thrombocytes, or platelets, that stop bleeding and allow wounds to heal. In the third trajectory, the white blood cells develop, which give us our innate immune defence, such as the granulocytes, for example, and in the fourth, the B and T cells develop, which form the basis for our acquired immune defence in the event of infection. However, as research progressed, the more and more difficult it became to distinguish these trajectories from each other.

Award Winner: Leif S. Ludwig

Credit: Thomas Rafalzyk, Berlin Institute of Health

FRANKFURT. Our blood renews itself constantly. Each second, millions of new cells are added to our bloodstream which replace dying blood cells. They originate from haematopoietic (blood-forming) stem cells in the bone marrow and then gradually mature over several stages. A distinction is traditionally made between four major developmental trajectories: the first trajectory produces the red blood cells that transport oxygen, the second supplies the thrombocytes, or platelets, that stop bleeding and allow wounds to heal. In the third trajectory, the white blood cells develop, which give us our innate immune defence, such as the granulocytes, for example, and in the fourth, the B and T cells develop, which form the basis for our acquired immune defence in the event of infection. However, as research progressed, the more and more difficult it became to distinguish these trajectories from each other.

Haematopoietic stem cells were discovered in 1961. This discovery enabled the introduction in the 1970s of bone marrow transplants to treat certain types of leukaemia. Observing how transplanted cells behave in the recipient’s organism led to many new insights into haematopoiesis. However, the fact that these insights were obtained under artificial conditions limited their informational value. After all, the transplanted stem cells had been taken beforehand from their natural context. With the help of genetic markers, however, since the 1980s it has been possible to study the development of blood cells in their natural context. This method, called lineage tracing, was applied with ever greater precision over the following decades – but only in animal experiments because, as it goes without saying, inserting artificial genetic markers into humans is out of the question.

In human blood, lineage tracing is only possible by observing natural DNA mutations that occur after cell division in one daughter cell but not in the other, and which thus only propagate in certain cell families (clones). In the 2010s, researchers attempted to trace such mutations in the entire genome of blood cells. However, in view of the over three billion “letters” (base pairs) in our genome and despite state-of-the-art methods, this is very expensive and prone to error. That is why Leif Ludwig concentrated on evidencing natural mutations in the mitochondria of blood cells. These cellular powerhouses have their own, much smaller genome of around 16,600 base pairs. Leif Ludwig combined their analysis with the latest single-cell sequencing technologies (single-cell omics), which enabled him to make statements about the actual health status of the cells under examination at the same time. He and his team have meanwhile refined their method in such a way that they can analyse tens of thousands of cells in bone marrow and blood samples from a patient.

It has been presumed for a long time that haematopoietic stem cells are not a uniform source but rather form a heterogeneous pool, from which various developmental trajectories develop and branch out in many directions during the continuous formation of new blood. For example, one stem cell might produce only thrombocytes, or platelets, another all kinds of blood cells. The relationships in our blood are therefore highly unclear. Leif Ludwig’s analytical method now makes it possible to disentangle them more easily in order to identify, for example, at which branch point a leukaemia cell develops or a degenerative change occurs. It opens up the possibility for human medicine to conduct such studies in the future for the first time in everyday clinical practice and to derive therapeutic interventions from them.

From 2003 onwards, Dr Leif Si-Hun Ludwig first studied biochemistry at the Free University of Berlin, then human medicine at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin. As a doctoral candidate in biochemistry, he conducted research at the Whitehead Institute of Biomedical Research from 2011 to 2015 and as a postdoctoral researcher at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard from 2016 to 2020, both in Cambridge/USA. He has led an Emmy Noether Junior Research Group at the Berlin Institute of Health at Charité and the Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology (Max Delbrück Center) since November 2020.

The prize will be awarded – together with the main prize for 2023 – by the Chairman of the Scientific Council of the Paul Ehrlich Foundation on 14 March 2023 at 5.00 p.m. in Frankfurt’s Paulskirche.

Pictures of the prize winner and detailed background information – “What the mitochondrion tells us” – can be downloaded from: www.paul-ehrlich-stiftung.de

 

The Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Early Career Award, first awarded in 2006, is presented once a year by the Paul Ehrlich Foundation to a young scientist working in Germany for outstanding achievements in biomedical research. The prize money of €60,000 must be used for research-related purposes. University professors and senior scientists at German research institutions are eligible to nominate candidates. The award winners are selected by the Foundation Council on the recommendation of an eight-member selection committee.

The Paul Ehrlich Foundation is a legally dependent foundation administered in trust by the Association of Friends and Benefactors of Goethe University. Honorary President of the Foundation, which was established in 1929 by Hedwig Ehrlich, is Professor Dr Katja Becker, President of the German Research Foundation, who also appoints the elected members of the Foundation Council and the Board of Trustees. The Chairman of the Scientific Council of the Paul Ehrlich Foundation is Professor Dr Thomas Boehm, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg, and the Chairman of the Board of Trustees is Professor Dr Jochen Maas, Managing Director Research & Development, Sanofi-Aventis Deutschland GmbH. In his function as Chairman of the Association of Friends and Benefactors of Goethe University, Prof. Dr Wilhelm Bender is also a member of the Scientific Council of the Paul Ehrlich Foundation. The President of Goethe University is in this capacity also a member of the Board of Trustees.

Goethe University is a research-oriented university in the European financial centre Frankfurt am Main. The university was founded in 1914 through private funding, primarily from Jewish sponsors, and has since produced pioneering achievements in the areas of social sciences, sociology and economics, medicine, quantum physics, brain research, and labour law. It gained a unique level of autonomy on 1 January 2008 by returning to its historic roots as a “foundation university”. Today, it is one of the three largest universities in Germany. Together with the Technical University of Darmstadt and the University of Mainz, it is a partner in the inter-state strategic Rhine-Main University Alliance. Internet: www.uni-frankfurt.de



Share12Tweet8Share2ShareShareShare2

Related Posts

Connections between peripheral artery disease, negative social determinants of health like poverty may lead to earlier diagnosis, intervention in at-risk Blacks

Connections between peripheral artery disease, negative social determinants of health like poverty may lead to earlier diagnosis, intervention in at-risk Blacks

January 31, 2023
Photomicrograph of Cryptococcus deneoformans

Warmer climate may drive fungi to be more dangerous to our health

January 30, 2023

Machine learning identifies drugs that could potentially help smokers quit

January 30, 2023

Marburg vaccine shows promising results in first-in-human study

January 30, 2023

POPULAR NEWS

  • Jean du Terrail, Senior Machine Learning Scientist at Owkin

    Nature Medicine publishes breakthrough Owkin research on the first ever use of federated learning to train deep learning models on multiple hospitals’ histopathology data

    64 shares
    Share 26 Tweet 16
  • First made-in-Singapore antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) approved to enter clinical trials

    58 shares
    Share 23 Tweet 15
  • Metal-free batteries raise hope for more sustainable and economical grids

    41 shares
    Share 16 Tweet 10
  • One-pot reaction creates versatile building block for bioactive molecules

    37 shares
    Share 15 Tweet 9

About

We bring you the latest biotechnology news from best research centers and universities around the world. Check our website.

Follow us

Recent News

An illuminated water droplet creates an ‘optical atom’

Connections between peripheral artery disease, negative social determinants of health like poverty may lead to earlier diagnosis, intervention in at-risk Blacks

Monitoring an ‘anti-greenhouse’ gas: Dimethyl sulfide in Arctic air

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 43 other subscribers
  • Contact Us

Bioengineer.org © Copyright 2023 All Rights Reserved.

No Result
View All Result
  • Homepages
    • Home Page 1
    • Home Page 2
  • News
  • National
  • Business
  • Health
  • Lifestyle
  • Science

Bioengineer.org © Copyright 2023 All Rights Reserved.

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password?

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In