A new European research consortium named "TimeLife" wants to use cell cultures to detect diseases at an early stage in order to develop precise therapeutic strategies. The 120 participating European scientists will initially receive one million euros from the European Union for a period of one year to work out a detailed plan.

Using organ-like systems (organoids) from the patient's own stem cells the researchers want to develop personalised disease models and carry out individual cell analyses. Gene modifications using CRISPR technology as well as imaging techniques will also be used to investigate how cells remain healthy, change over the course of a lifetime, become ill and react to drugs. The large amounts of data from high-throughput investigations require computer-assisted strategies for data analysis and pattern recognition when changing the cells studied. The data will serve as the basis for mathematical modelling.

With the help of mini organs - such as brain organoids in this case - the techniques of single cell analysis can also be applied to human tissue.
Photo: Agnieszka Rybak Wolf, working group of Nikolaus Rajewsky at BIMSB / MDC

In the project consortium, scientists from 50 institutions from various disciplines such as biology, medicine, physics, computer science and mathematics, but also social sciences, ethics and economics will work together. Through a survey in advance, the researchers want to respond to the needs of society and expect a substantial contribution to the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and data-processing industries at the end.

The runtime of TimeLife is 10 years. The consortium is coordinated by the Max Delbrück Center in Berlin together with the Institut Curie in Paris.

Source:
https://idw-online.de/de/news708893

The this year's research award for the promotion and development of alternative and complementary methods to animal testing of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg went to Professor Dr Arne Hansen from the Institute of Experimental Pharmacology and Toxicology of the University Hospital Hamburg-Eppendorf. He was awarded for his in-vitro developments of human heart tissue.

A new register has been established at the German Centre for the Protection of Laboratory Animals (Bf3R). Scientists can voluntarily register their animal experiments in advance. The register is intended to prevent duplications.

As part of the Horizon 2020 program, the EU is funding the cloud-based neuroinformatics platform VirtualBrainCloud, which is coordinated by Charité University Hospital Berlin. The aim is to improve diagnosis and therapy for patients suffering from neurodegenerative diseases using computer simulation.