Scientists at IMBA are passionate about discovery and advancing our understanding of biology. They are recognized leaders in their fields, regularly publishing in the top research journals. Contributions from IMBA research groups are of interest to everyone – including scientists, clinicians, and the public. The Research Highlights below summarize some of the most significant discoveries made by IMBA scientists.
IMBA is lead participant in a new, cell-based medicine initiative for Europe
Hundreds of innovators, research pioneers, clinicians, industry leaders and policy makers from all around Europe are united by a vision of how to revolutionize healthcare. In two publications – a perspective article in the journal Nature and the LifeTimeStrategic Research Agenda – they now present a detailed roadmap of how to leverage the latest scientific breakthroughs and technologies over the next decade, to track, understand and treat human cells throughout an individual’s lifetime.
The LifeTime initiative, including IMBA, has developed a strategy to advance personalised treatment for five major disease classes: cancer, neurological-, infectious-, chronic inflammatory- and cardiovascular diseases. The aim is a new age of personalised, cell-based interceptive medicine for Europe with the potential of improved health outcomes and more cost-effective treatment, resulting in profoundly changeing a person’s healthcare experience.
Earlier detection and more effective treatment of diseases
To form a functioning, healthy body, our cells follow developmental paths during which they acquire specific roles in tissues and organs. But when they deviate from their healthy course, they accumulate changes leading to disease which remain undetected until symptoms appear. At this point, medical treatment is often invasive, expensive and inefficient. However, now we have the technologies to capture the molecular makeup of individual cells and to detect the emergence of disease or therapy resistance much earlier. Using breakthrough single-cell and imaging technologies in combination with artificial intelligence and personalized disease models will allow us to not only predict disease onset earlier, but also to select the most effective therapies for individual patients. Targeting disease-causing cells to intercept disorders before irreparable damage occurs will substantially improve the outlook for many patients and has the potential of saving billions of Euros of disease-related costs in Europe.
A detailed roadmap for implementing LifeTime
The perspective article “LifeTime and improving European healthcare through cell-based interceptive medicine”and the LifeTime Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) explain how these technologies should be rapidly co-developed, transitioned into clinical settings and applied to the five major disease areas. Close interactions between European infrastructures, research institutions, hospitals and industry will be essential to generate, share and analyze LifeTime’s big medical data across European borders. The initiative’s vision advocates ethically responsible research to benefit citizens all across Europe.
According to Professor Nikolaus Rajewsky, scientific director of the Berlin Institute for Medical System Biology at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine and coordinator of the LifeTime Initiative, the LifeTime approach is the way into the future:
"LifeTime has brought together scientists across fields – from biologists, to clinicians, data scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and physicists – to enable a much improved understanding ofmolecular mechanisms driving health and disease. Cell-based medicine will allow doctors to diagnose diseases earlier and intercept disorders before irreparable damage has occurred. LifeTime has a unique value proposition that promises to improve the European patient’s health.
“The development of organoid systems has led to a paradigm shift in personalized medicine as this technology allows a transfer of clinical testing from the patient to the lab. We are excited to be part of LifeTime, where we aim to combine the most diverse modern approaches from various disciplines in order to achieve an ambitious goal: to understand human life at the level of individual cells and cell groups, in all its complexity,” says Jürgen Knoblich, IMBA´s scientific director and LifeTime partner.
Literature:
Rajewsky, N. et al. LifeTime and improving European healthcare through cell-based interceptive medicine. Nature https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2715-9
LifeTime Strategic Research Agenda
Torres-Padilla, M. E. et al. Thinking ‘ethical’ when designing a new biomedical research consortium. EMBO J, doi:10.15252/embj.2020105725 (2020)
About LifeTime
The LifeTime Initiative is a growing community of more than 100 leading European research institutions and hospitals, together with international advisers and over 80 supporting companies. LifeTime includes the preeminent European laboratories developing multi-omic strategies, scientific infrastructures, bioimaging and computational technologies, as well as world-renowned laboratories in the area of personalized disease models, bioethicists and a core group of leading clinician scientists. Many of the involved institutions include or are linked to translational/clinical research facilities and hospitals, ensuring that LifeTime discoveries can be rapidly translated into clinical practice.