Utrecht: Tear glands in the Petri dish

Thursday, 18 March 2021 14:03

To study tear production, the lab of developmental biologist professor Hans Clever, M.D., at University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands developed a method to grow tear gland cells as organoids.

SIMCor: Medical product testing by computer

Thursday, 18 March 2021 12:59

In a project, named SIMCor, an international team of researchers led by Charité University Medicine aims to create a computer platform for the development, testing, validation, and approval of cardiovascular implants. Their aim is to replace medical device testing on animals.

A team of researchers led by Professor Yaakov Nahmias, director of the Grass Center for Bioengineering at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and founder of Tissue Dynamic, has presented a new technological approach with the potential to develop new drugs quickly and rapidly and without animal testing.

With the 4th call for funding within the Computational Life Sciences (CompLS) program of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), the topic "AI methods for infection research" has been defined.

Researchers at the University of Bern and at Inselspital Bern have cultivated so-called prostate organoids and successfully tested their efficacy with various drugs. In this way, it is possible to determine which therapy is most likely to benefit patients before starting treatment.

BIH: Many diseases - one common cause

Friday, 12 March 2021 10:17

Scientists at the Berlin Institute of Health (BIH) at Charité - University Hospital Berlin, together with colleagues from Munich and the United Kingdom, have shown that multimorbidity in older people - suffering from several diseases at the same time - often has a common cause.

Scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology (IGB) in Stuttgart have developed immunocompetent skin models with which they are investigating the suitability of immune modulators.

A team of researchers at Charité Berlin and the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC), led by private lecturer Dr. Michael Sigal, has discovered how SARS-CoV-2 uses the immune system to increasingly hijack mucosal cells of the body and multiply there. For their studies, they used intestinal organoids.

At Charité, a 15-year-old patient with a rare disease (Leigh syndrome - cardiomyopathy) has been treated therapeutically, after scientists worked on a personalized in vitro disease model to find a suitable drug.

In a new Bavarian network, a team from Würzburg University Hospital is researching the effects of ultra-fine dust. For this purpose, complex cell culture models from the human nasal mucosa are used.