Poster awards for ARCN scientists at DZL Annual Meeting

At this year’s DZL Annual Meeting in Heidelberg, ARCN researchers won poster prizes worth €500 each in three categories. For the first time, the selection was made using a peer review process: all participants at the Annual Meeting were asked to evaluate posters from their own Disease Areas, Platforms, and Disease-Spanning Working Groups (DSWG). They were only excluded from evaluating posters from their own DZL site.

The Awardees from ARCN

• Imaging Platform: Noah Heldt, University of Lübeck
• Disease-Spanning Working Group Lung-Environment Interaction: Gyde Nissen and Markus Weckmann, University Medical Center Schleswig-Holstein (Lübeck Campus)
• Disease-Spanning Working Group Microbiome-Metagenome: Aleksandra Sarnowicz, Research Center Borstel

dOCT moving towards clinics

Noah Heldt is continuing the successful Lübeck development of dynamic optical coherence tomography (dOCT). His work, presented in Heidelberg, is entitled: “Investigating the signal origins in dOCT and translating a new functional contrast to fluorescence imaging.” By comparing OCT and fluorescence microscopy, he aims to learn more about the origin of the signals in OCT. This is not always clear, as OCT images are created solely on the basis of the light scattering properties of the tissue. In contrast, fluorescent dyes can be used to label very specific cell or tissue components. The fact that no contrast agents or dyes need to be administered in OCT is an advantage, as this reduces the burden on patients. At the moment, work is being carried out on tissue samples, in animal models, and clinical trials. According to Noah Heldt, the long-term goal is to “continuously work towards bringing dynamic optical coherence tomography into clinical practice as a functional, label-free imaging technique in order to improve diagnostic capabilities.”

A genetic score to predict lung function

The poster by Gyde Nissen and Markus Weckmann is entitled “Lung regeneration of children born preterm associated with a polygenic risk score for adult COPD” and builds on the successful work published in the journal NEJM Evidence. The key finding was that a genetic analysis known as a polygenic risk score (PRS), which is associated with COPD and poor lung function in adults, could be also applied to premature babies. Premature babies with an unfavourable PRS were found to have poor lung function parameters between the ages of 5 and 7. Premature children generally have a higher risk of poor lung function in adulthood. The follow-up analysis of over 600 children aged 11, presented at the DZL Annual Meeting, showed that the lung function of premature children between the ages of 5 and 11 regenerates according to their genetic COPD profile. Gyde Nissen stated that “even children with bronchopulmonary dysplasia, a serious complication in premature babies with low birth weight, had less impaired lung function if they had a low polygenic risk”.

Novel pro-inflammatory substance found in bacteria

The third Poster Award went to Aleksandra Sarnowicz for her work on “LC-HRMS-based non-targeted identification of bioactive metabolites produced by clinical isolates of non-typeable Haemophilus influenzae.” She is studying non-typeable Haemophilus influenzae (NTHi), a bacterium that occurs in chronic lung diseases. In a mass spectrometric study, the Borstel-based researcher found the molecule hypoxanthine, which has pro-inflammatory properties and may thus contribute to NTHi colonization in chronic lung diseases. It could therefore be a link between bacteria and symptoms. “We now plan to measure hypoxanthine in patient samples,” explains Aleksandra Sarnowicz. “We also want to investigate how NTHi influences the development of disease through hypoxanthine.” 

The projects cover the entire DZL spectrum of prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of lung diseases. We are building on their successful progress to improve the quality of patient care. 

Sources: DZL and own

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