WISSENSSTADT BERLIN 2021: About the dream of a Berlin "cell clinic" and the desire to be able to treat diseases before they break out
Innovative single-cell technologies were the "breakthrough of the year" in 2018: the science magazine Science named the new techniques with which scientists can analyse individual body cells the most important achievement. For the first time, it was possible to dissect organs, tumours or even entire insect larvae into individual cells, measure their gene activity and, with the help of high-performance computers and artificial intelligence, reassemble the individual cell analyses into a whole organ or organism.
"It's as if we invented a super microscope with which we could look into every cell in a tissue, into all the cells at the same time, and see what is going on molecularly in the cell - for example, when and why it gets sick," says Nikolaus Rajewsky. Almost every cell contains the whole genome, the genetic material of the person in question, encoded in four letters that are strung together to form a big book with a few billion letters. As long as the cell is alive, it is busy reading the complex blueprints written in this "book of life". Deciphering the "book of life" is the goal of the joint research initiative of the three research institutions Berlin Institute of Health, Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology of the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine and Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin.
Speakers
- Prof. Christopher Baum, physician and molecular biologist, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Berlin Institute of Health at Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin
- Dr Stefan Frank, Director Stem Cell Platform Strategy, Cell & Gene Therapy, Bayer AG
- Prof. Nikolaus Rajewsky, systems biologist, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin and Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine, also physicist, concert pianist and Leibniz Prize winner
- Prof. Simone Spuler, Head of the "Myology" Working Group and the University Outpatient Clinic for Muscle Diseases, Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine and Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin
Moderation
- Dr Philipp Graf, Science Journalist, Senior Editor BIOCOM