Prof. Strittmatter was awarded one of the 2024 ERC Starting Grants for the CITE Project. The project aims to study why in some types of cancer, drugs gradually lose their effectiveness during treatment or fail to work from the start. This is especially common in pancreatic cancer. In the next 5 years we aim to explore whether the cause lies in the tumor microenvironment — i.e., whether cells and microbes within the tumor itself are inactivating the drugs. To study these interactions in isolation from drug metabolism by the rest of the body, we will be developing new analytical techniques relying on advanced imaging mass spectrometry methods to map the cells in the tumor microenvironment of pancreatic tumors and develop models to analyze how drugs are metabolized under realistic conditions. 

I would like to thank the European Research Council (ERC) and its panel and reviewers, and especially my colleagues at the Technical University of Munich and everyone else who has supported me on the path to this grant! We congratulate the other 8 recipients at TUM  as well as all other recipients over Europe  on the awardof this amazing opportunity to really make a concerted effort towards understanding the problems that trouble our society. 

We are currently advertising two positions as part of this ERC project. Please follow the link if you are interested to apply. 

Prof. Strittmatter was giving a keynote at the 9th Lipidomics Forum 2024 in Borstel and enjoyed three days of scientific discussion, networkign and learning! Thanks to Dominik Schwudke for extending this invitation. The next Lipidomics Forum will take place from the 14.-17.09.2024 in Vienna. Stay tuned!

Dr. Lieby Zborovksy gave a great talk at the Imaging of Infection session at the annual Meeting of the European Society for Molecular Imaging. Her talk focussed on the metabolic changes happening during H. pylori infection, a project we are collaborating on with colleagues at the Klinikum rechts der Isar (Raquel Mejias-Luque, Markus Gerhard), a project mass spectrometry imaging and multimodal imaging is perfectly suited to investigate. Stay tuned for more! 

And this is our wordcloud, created from titles of previous publications! Created using this link (minimum word count 3). This shows a strong technology focus on in situ MS methods, especially imaging mass spectrometry.

Prof. Strittmatter had the pleasure to give one of three plenary talks at the 4th Poznan Meeting on Modern pharmaceutical and biomedical analytics in health care on the use of mass spectrometry imaging in multimodal imaging workflows to study drug disposition and resistance.

Mihyun Park (shared PhD student with Prof Angela Casini, Chair for Medicinal and Bioinorganic Chemistry) has published a review titled "Seeing the invisible: Preparative strategies to visualise elusive molecules using mass spectrometry imaging" in Trends in Analytical Chemistry. You can find it using this link. It gives a great overview over options to make biomolecules amenable to mass spectrometry imaging analysis. 

We are super excited to receive our first DFG funding as part of the FOR5560 research unit "Crosstalk between B cell signaling and metabolism" (speaker: Prof. Dr. Julia Jellusova, Professorship for immune signalling at the TranslaTUM). You can read the news item here. We have a project together with Prof. Dr. Jürgen Ruland (Institute for Clinical Chemistry and Pathobiochemistry, TUM School of Medicine) to study the effect of the MALT1 signaling network in B cell metabolism and function. The project is expected to start later this summer. 

Prof. Strittmatter and Mihyun Park were presenting to pupils interested in a career in science. Thanks to the organisers for inviting us to participate in such a great initiative! 

The International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) Foundation is an independent, non-profit organization dedicated to education and competition, the advancement of synthetic biology, and the development of an open community and collaboration. It is primarily made up of university students and best known for its annual iGEM Competition. 

Today was the first day of our newest PhD student Wei Chen. Wellcome! Chen studied chemistry at TUM and did her MSc thesis with Prof. Elsner and Dr. Bakkhour at the Chair of Analytical Chemistry and Waterchemistry. Chen will work on the characterisation of the MALT1 signaling network in B cell metabolism and function! We are glad to have you!

Be invited to attend Prof. Strittmatter's Lecture as part of the monthly TranslaTUM seminar series. 

Welcome to our new Ph.D. student Min Qiu, who has won a CSC Scholarship to be with us and will work on the spatial metabolic heterogeneity of biofilms!

Norbert Kreisz is starting his MSc project with us today! He will develop screening methodologies for lipopolypeptides using mass spectrometry. Welcome!

Postdoc Lieby Zborovsky has joined our group! Her main focus will be imaging mass spectrometry of tissue specimen to study disease.

Ph.D. students Mihyun Park and Daniel Heffernan had their first day today! We are now officially a group!