Two awards at once, both carrying high monetary prizes, go to two HI-STEM members: Simon Raffel will receive the 2017 Walter Schulz Prize for his discovery how misregulated breakdown of amino acids in leukemia stem cells promotes blood cancer. To find out more about this work, read our news feature.

Simon Haas will share the 2018 Otto Schmeil Prize with his colleague Lars Velten from EMBL. The two stem cell researchers have jointly demonstrated that the development of blood cells in the bone marrow follows very different paths from what scientists have assumed up to now.

 Read more:

• DKFZ Press Release
• Otto-Schmeil-Preis
• Walter-Schulz Forschungspreis

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

Since its installation in 2008, HI-STEM can look back at ten years of successful research. On March 28, 2018, the Dietmar-Hopp Foundation and the DKFZ have announced that the funding for HI-STEM will be prolonged until 20203. Additionally two new projects on circulating tumor cells and therapy resistance in pancreatic cancer.

All members of HI-STEM are grateful for the continuous generous support by the Dietmar Hopp Foundation and the DKFZ and are looking forward to five more years of exciting research!

Further Information:

• DKFZ Press Release  (German Version)
• Press Release of the Dietmar Hopp Foundation (in German only)

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