New Bioactive Compound for Difficult-to-Treat Allergies

Study leads to the discovery of a promising receptor blocker

02-May-2025 - Irritable bowel syndrome, chronic itching, asthma and migraine are in many cases hard-to-treat conditions. They have in common that they are triggered by an excessive immune response—which in severe cases can be life-threatening. A team of researchers led by the University of Bonn has now ...

New numbering system facilitates comparability of protein domains

Researchers analyse models using AI

30-Jan-2025 - Adhesion GPCRs are a group of cell-surface sensors associated with many body functions and diseases. However, they are not yet sufficiently understood to be exploited for therapies. Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) 1423 at Leipzig University aims to change this. Scientists at the Faculty of ...

Advance in pain relief research

Naturally occurring hederagenin binds to pain regulation receptor

13-Dec-2024 - A team of scientists led by Professor Annette Beck-Sickinger from the Institute of Biochemistry at Leipzig University has made an important advance in pain relief research. They discovered that hederagenin, a naturally occurring substance found in the medicinal plant ivy, binds to the pain ...

How Immune Cells “Sniff Out” Pathogens

Researchers are using an innovative method to watch immune receptors go about their business

19-Nov-2024 - Immune cells are capable of detecting infections just like a sniffer dog, using special sensors known as Toll-like receptors, or TLRs for short. But what signals activate TLRs, and what is the relationship between the scale and nature of this activation and the substance being detected? In a ...

What triggers the programmed cell death mechanism?

Development and combination of various microscopic and spectroscopic techniques

13-Sep-2024 - How can molecular structures be analysed when the resolution of the techniques available is not sufficient? Researchers from the fields of physics, chemistry and medicine at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) have combined and further developed various microscopic and spectroscopic ...

A new drug target for psychiatric disorders

11-Sep-2024 - Misha Kudryashev’s lab at the Max Delbrück Center has identified a molecular intermediate of a serotonin receptor that is involved in diseases such as depression and schizophrenia. The study points to a potentially new target for therapeutics. A new study published in “The EMBO Journal” points ...

Biophysicists decipher functionality of adrenaline-binding receptor

In the future, researchers may be able to use these results to better avoid side effects when developing drugs

26-Jun-2024 - G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) are found throughout the human body and are involved in many complex signalling pathways. Despite their importance in many biological processes, the central mechanism of G protein-coupling and the associated signal transmission is not yet understood. A team of ...

New regulator of eating behaviour identified

New potential approach to treating obesity

07-May-2024 - The rapidly escalating prevalence of overweight and obesity poses a significant medical challenge worldwide. In addition to people’s changing lifestyles, genetic factors also play a key role in the development of obesity. Scientists at Leipzig University and Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf ...

Machine learning classifier accelerates the development of cellular immunotherapies

"To finance further development, we have founded the biotech start-up Tcelltech"

19-Mar-2024 - Making a personalised T cell therapy for cancer patients currently takes at least six months; scientists at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and the University Medical Center Mannheim have shown that the laborious first step of identifying tumor-reactive T cell receptors for patients can ...

Researchers “film” the activation of an important receptor

Study may lead to the development of improved medicines

15-Mar-2024 - An international team of researchers has succeeded in “filming” the activation of an important receptor. They froze the involved molecules at different points in time and photographed them under the electron microscope. They were then able to place these still images in sequence. This sequence ...