A joint project of the Medical Faculty Mannheim and the DKFZ won the Heidelberg Innovation Call launched by Merck.
Most forms of colorectal cancer (CRC) are resistant to currently available cancer immunotherapies, which rely on the acquired immune defense. Can treatment resistance be overcome by additionally boosting innate immune defenses?
This is one of the questions that scientists at the Mannheim Medical Faculty of Heidelberg University and the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) are going to investigate to be able to treat this type of cancers more effectively in the future. Their joint strategy convinced the jury of the Merck Heidelberg Innovation Call.
Merck, a vibrant science and technology company, opened in 2019 a call for Proposals of Breakthrough Innovation Research Projects in Heidelberg. BioRN facilitated the dissemination of the call among the university and research institution research groups, to identify breakthrough ideas for new treatment paradigms for cancer and autoimmune diseases.
In this context Merck is funding the Heidelberg-Mannheim project "Overcoming Therapy Resistance by Strengthening the Innate Immune Defense of Tumors".
The project brings together expertise in clinical oncology (Prof. Dr. Matthias Ebert, II Medical Clinic), immunology (Prof. Dr. Adelheid Cerwenka, Mannheim Medical Faculty) and functional genomics (Prof. Dr. Michael Boutros, DKFZ and Mannheim Medical Faculty)
Original News (in German)