Today, over 200 high-school students have visited the DKFZ to learn more about stem cells and their potential for applications in medicine. The UniStem Day is an international endeaveour to educate young people. In Germany it is organized in parallel at eleven cities and is coordinated by the German Stem Cell Network (GSCN).

Read more: HI-STEM participates in UniStem Day 2018

In the publication, which appeared online at Nature.comon January 17, 2018, the regulation of Myc by a modular gene enhancer in the normal hematopoietic system and in leukemia is described. The study, which was driven forward by Carsten Bahr, PhD Student at DKFZ and HI-STEM, Lisa von Paleske, former PhD student and Postdoc in the Trumpp lab and Veli Uslu from the group of François Spitz at EMBL, shows that the expression of the Myc oncogene is determined by a distant section of DNA that contains a cluster of transcriptional enhancers. In leukemia stem cells this cluster, which was named BENC for Blood Enhancer Cluster, is deregulated, which affects Myc activity and thereby accelerates cancer growth. Furthermore, it could be shown that BENC activity correlates with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) patient survival.

Further Reading:

·         Carsten Bahr*, Lisa von Paleske*, Veli V. Uslu*, Silvia Remeseiro, Naoya Takayama, Stanley W. Ng, Alex Murison, Katja Langenfeld, Massimo Petretich, Roberta Scognamiglio, Petra Zeisberger, Amelie Benk, Ido Amit, Peter W. Zandstra, Mathieu Lupien, John E. Dick, Andreas Trumpp@ and François Spitz@: A cluster of distal Myc enhancers regulates normal and leukaemic haematopoietic stem cell hierarchies. Nature 2018, DOI: 10.1038/nature25193
*: shared first authorship, @: joint corresponding authorship

·         DKFZ Press Release

Graphical abstract describing the function of BENC in normal haematopoesis and in Leukemia.

On February 5, 2018, the Chica and Heinz Schaller Research Award were presented to HI-STEM Group Leader Marieke Essers during the official award ceremony at Heidelberg University. She received the award for her pioneering work on hematopoietic stem cells and their activation during stress conditions. The award is endowed with 100,000 euros. Prof. Petra Boukamp, a researcher at the Leibniz Research Institute for Environmental Medicine and former division head at the DKFZ, emphasized during her laudation, how Marieke, as a successful scientist and team leader made important contributions to the elucidation of stem cell functions in hematopoiesis and the role of inflammatory processes on them.

Marieke, who has been a group leader at HI-STEM since 2009, especially thanked the Dietmar-Hopp-Foundation for the generous support of the research carried out at HI-STEM, which is run as a public-private partnership between the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and the foundation.

The second award was presented to Dr. Theodore Alexandrov from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) for his pioneering work in metabolome research.

Further Information:

·         Press Release of German Cancer Resarch Center

·         Website of the Chica and Heinz Schaller Foundation

·         Research Group Marieke Essers: Stress-induced Activation of Hematopoietic Stem Cells

Our recent Nature paper on BCAT1 overexpression in leukemia has been featured in the Research Watch section of Cancer Discovery:

High BCAT1 Expression Mimics IDH Mutations in Acute Myeloid Leukemia | Cancer Discovery