Christian Oeing is a specialist in internal medicine at the Department of Cardiology, Angiology and Intensive Care Medicine at the German Heart Center of the Charité (DHZC). He has received the "Emmy Noether Program" of the German Research Foundation (DFG) for his heart failure research. The program is endowed with a funding sum of 1.5 million euros over six years and enables him to be appointed to a professorship even without habilitation.
Oeing leads a four-member junior research group and has already been conducting research on his topic since 2018: cases of heart failure with preserved pump function are increasing worldwide, but there are only a few therapeutic options. The protein complex mTOR plays a prominent role in many diseases, but has not been studied in depth in the heart. The research team has identified a novel phosphorylation site on an mTOR-modulating protein that can be used to alter mTOR mechanisms in the cardiac myocyte. The team now wants to explore this further using mouse models, human stem cells as well as biochemical methods to develop new therapies.
Jan Klocke is an assistant physician at the Department of Nephrology and Medical Intensive Care at Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin. He has now received the "2023 ISN-KI Early Career Researcher Award for Clinical Science" for his research on acute kidney injury.
Sudden deterioration of kidney function - also known as acute kidney injury, AKI - occurs in up to 10% of all hospitalized patients, and in up to 50% of all intensive care patients, and can develop into chronic kidney disease. Klocke and his team have succeeded in obtaining kidney tissue cells from the urine of patients with AKI, which was previously only possible by direct puncture of the kidney. Single-cell sequencing of these cells provides information about the status and progression of the disease. In the future, these findings could facilitate the diagnosis of AKI and help identify possible risk groups for a transition to chronic kidney disease.