News

Targeted drugs are a cornerstone of personalized medicine, yet come with important drawbacks. They restrain disease progression – but rarely eradicate the cancer. Patients therefore need to take the drugs essentially forever, exposing them to severe side effects and incurring high costs for the healthcare system. Combination therapies could potentially overcome these limitations. A study by scientists from CeMM, the Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in collaboration with the Medical University of Vienna shows how epigenetic analysis and automated microscopy help prioritize new drug combinations for leukemia therapy. The results were published in Nature Chemical Biology. (DOI: 10.1038/s41589-018-0205-2) on 28 January 2019.

Glioblastoma is a brain cancer with devastating prognosis. A new collaborative study by scientists from CeMM, MedUni Vienna and the Austrian Brain Tumor Registry network demonstrates how epigenetic analysis of tumor samples collected in routine clinical practice could be used to better classify and treat the disease. The results were published in Nature Medicine.

We congratulate CeMM PI Christoph Bock on being awarded the 2017 Overton Prize of the International Society of Computational Biology (ISCB). Each year, this prestigious award is given to one early to mid-career scientist from any country who is recognized as an emerging leader in computational biology and bioinformatics.

Researchers at the St. Anna Children’s Cancer Research Institute (CCRI) and CeMM observed unexpected variety in the epigenome of Ewing sarcoma, an aggressive childhood cancer. This finding, published in Nature Medicine, supports the importance of epigenetics in pediatric tumors and provides new perspectives for developing personalized therapies.

A new cell screening method combines two revolutionary tools of biomedical research: Scientists at Christoph Bock’s lab have integrated CRISPR genome editing with single-cell RNA sequencing. Their study, published in Nature Methods, establishes a method for studying gene regulation in unprecedented scale and detail.

The sequencing of the human genome was a milestone for biology and medicine – but not all is written in our genes. Scientists are now presenting a second chapter of the book of life: Over the last five years, a worldwide consortium of scientists has established epigenetic maps of 2,100 cell types. Within this coordinated effort, CeMM contributed detailed DNA methylation maps of the developing blood, opening up new perspectives for the understanding and treatment of leukemia and immune diseases.

Tissue-resident macrophages are pivotal cells of the immune system. They exist in many shapes, and it has so far remained unclear how they colonize the body and give rise to the observed variety. In a study published in Science, the underlying differentiation and specification mechanisms are unraveled.

In a series of four papers, published in Nature Biotechnology and Nature Communications, an international group of scientists led by CeMM’s Principal Investigator Christoph Bock and Stephan Beck (University College London, UCL) have marked the feasibility of epigenetic analysis for clinical diagnostics and precision medicine.

The pancreas is a crucial organ for eating behavior, digestion and metabolism and it plays a major role in the development of diabetes. In so called “Langerhans Islets”, specialized groups of cells precisely regulate blood sugar. But they are hard to study, only a few molecular markers are known to differentiate those pancreatic cell types. With the first single cell transcriptomes, established by Stefan Kubicek and Christoph Bock at CeMM, a new powerful tool for future investigations has been created to overcome those problems.

It is with great pleasure to announce that the European Research Council has awarded ERC Starting Grants to two Principal Investigators in 2015. CeMM congratulates Andreas Bergthaler and Christoph Bock and their teams for receiving this prestigious and well-endowed grants!