Beige fat cells with a “Sisyphus mechanism”

A new class of fat cells makes people healthier: The cells consume energy and produce heat through seemingly pointless biochemical reactions.

16-Aug-2024 - Fat cells come in three colours: white, brown, and beige. White fat cells store fat in our body as an energy reserve. We need these cells, but having too many creates health problems. Brown fat cells are particularly active in infants. They produce heat and thus maintain the baby’s body ...

Researchers identify key differences in inner workings of immune cells

As well as improving our understanding of the immune system, these findings could also potentially lead to better cancer therapies

12-Jun-2024 - Using machine-learning methods, researchers at ETH Zurich have shown that more than half of all killer T cells exhibit nuclear invaginations, or folds in the cell’s nuclear envelope. Thanks to this particular cellular architecture, such cells are able to mount a faster and stronger response to ...

Predictions of the effect of drugs on individual cells are now possible

The understanding of cell variation is pivotal for advancing more effective treatments

09-Oct-2023 - Experts from ETH Zurich, the University of Zurich, and the University Hospital Zurich have used machine learning to jointly create an innovative method. This new approach can predict how individual cells react to specific treatments, offering hope for more accurate diagnoses and ...

Building muscle in the lab

This provides a potential for treating patients with muscle diseases – and for those who would like to eat meat, but don’t want to kill animals.

18-Aug-2023 - ETH Zurich Professor Ori Bar-​Nur and his team grow muscle cells in the laboratory. In this case, they are mouse cells, but the researchers are also interested in human and cow cells. Promising applications resonate with both: human muscle tissue cultured in the lab could be used in surgery, ...

Cells as computers

Such reprogrammed cells could perform medical tasks in our bodies, such as diagnosing diseases or providing treatment

10-Mar-2021 - Scientists at ETH Zurich are working to develop information-​processing switching systems in biological cells. Now, for the first time, they have developed an OR switch in human cells that reacts to different signals. Biological cells might one day be equipped with artificial genetic programs ...

Lighting the path for cells

Instructing cells to grow in a particular direction is a long-cherished dream

13-May-2020 - ETH researchers have developed a new method in which they use light to draw patterns of molecules that guide living cells. The approach allows for a closer look at the development of multicellular organisms – and in the future may even play a part in novel therapies. Highly complex organisms can ...

Healthy organelles, healthy cells

02-Oct-2019 - It has recently become clear just how important membraneless organelles are for cells. Now biochemists at ETH Zurich have discovered a novel mechanism that regulates the formation of these organelles. This has laid the foundation for more targeted research into diseases such as Alzheimer’s or ...

Redundancies in T cells

19-Jun-2019 - Researchers at ETH Zurich have discovered redundancies in the biochemical signalling pathways of immune cells. This finding has important implications for advances in cancer immunotherapy, among other areas. Oncologists have had great success with cancer immunotherapy in recent years, especially ...

Major step towards individual cancer immunotherapy

ETH spin-off founded for commercial further development of technique

02-Apr-2019 - Medicine has great hopes for personalised cancer immunotherapy. The idea is to have a vaccine prompt the immune system to fight a tumour. Scientists at ETH Zurich have developed a method that allows them to determine which molecules are suited to patient-specific immunisation. Cells belonging to ...

How proteins become embedded in a cell membrane

14-Feb-2019 - Many proteins with important biological functions are embedded in a biomembrane in the cells of humans and other living organisms. But how do they get in there in the first place? Researchers in the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering at ETH Zurich investigated the matter. Nearly a ...