Parasitic worms help Professor Clarissa Prazeres da Costa and her team better understand the human immune system in order to find solutions to global health problems.
Why do blood clots develop in the first place—and why do they tend to recur? LMU researcher Konstantin Stark believes that the answers lie in the immune system.
At RCI, the Regensburg Center for Interventional Immunology, international research groups develop immunotherapies and cellular therapies in order to help treating patients suffering from tumors, chronic inflammation or autoimmunity.
From junior research group leader to full professor and spokesperson of the Research Center for Infectious Diseases (ZINF) at the University of Würzburg. This is the scientific career path of Cynthia Sharma.
Luca Gattinoni and Matthias Edinger from the Leibniz Institute for Immunotherapy (LIT) and University Hospital Regensburg (UKR) have received a 2.6 million euro grant from the German Cancer Aid. The funding will support an innovative clinical study using stem-like CAR T cells to treat patients with advanced lymphomas.
Professor Isabel Roditi has been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant to further strengthen her outstanding research into the pathogen that causes sleeping sickness. She intends to carry out her research at the University of Würzburg.
ERC Advanced Grant for Bernhard Nieswandt Prof. Dr. Bernhard Nieswandt has been awarded a prestigious ERC Advanced Grant worth 2.5 million euros by the European Research Council for his research on a cellular mechanism in blood platelets that appears to play a crucial role in inflammatory diseases.
Immune cells must learn not to attack the body itself. A team of researchers from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU) has discovered a previously unknown mechanism behind this: other immune cells, the B cells, contribute to the "training" of the T cells in the thymus gland. If this process fails, autoimmune diseases can develop. The study confirms this for Neuromyelitis optica, a disease similar to Multiple Sclerosis. Other autoimmune diseases may be linked to the failure of this new mechanism as well.
After stem cell transplantation, the donated immune cells sometimes attack the patients' bodies. This is known as graft versus host disease or GvHD. Researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the Universitätsklinikum Regensburg (UKR) have shown that GvHD is much less common when certain microbes are present in the gut. In the future, it may be possible to deliberately bring about this protective composition of the microbiome.
In order for immune cells to do their job, they need to know against whom they should direct their attack. Research teams at the University of Würzburg have identified new details in this process.