Together with two other research groups from the Institute of Bioengineering in Catalonia, Spain and Duke University in the USA, she will receive a total of 1.2 million euros in funding over three years. Blaeschke and her colleagues want to use the money to implement a new and particularly ambitious project: Many messenger substances and molecular factors work together to enable tissue to be assembled from individual cells in the human body. A complex interplay of hundreds of different molecules normally ensures that all cell types end up in the right place.
Using mini-tumors cultivated from skin cancer and brain tumor samples and synthetic particles with messenger substances, the team now wants to investigate how these messenger substances interact in tumors so that cancer cells, but also the body's own immune cells, are given a certain arrangement and the surrounding tissue of tumors is also restructured. A completely new “barcode method” enables the marking of individual cells, particles and messenger substances and thus a spatial mapping of the events in the tumor tissue.
The research team wants to use this to analyze the molecular network of signaling substances in order to manipulate it in the long term and direct immune cells specifically against the cancer.
