Research Luxembourg, a joint initiative of the main players in Luxembourg's public research sector, is mobilising its knowledge and its human and material resources to help address the challenge of COVID-19.

Immune evasion is a hallmark of cancer progression and represents a major hurdle to the design of effective therapeutic strategies. We recently uncovered a widely conserved mechanism by which resistant tumor cells respond to immune effector cell attack. The ACTIVASION project aims at exploring how this mechanism (i.e. fast remodeling of the tumor cell actin cytoskeleton) alters the structure and the function of the immunological synapse, the cell-cell interaction interface used by immune cells to recognize and kill target cancer cells.

The Data Manager & BI Specialist, under the direction of the IT BISManager, will ensure data organization, storage and analysis while always upholding agreed-upon security standards.  He/she will be responsible for overseeing the development and use of data systems, in order to deliver high quality solutions that span multiple technologies/platforms.

Postdoctoral fellows Amela Jusic, from the LIH Department of Population Health (DoPH), Marie Boudaud and Tomasz Uchanski, from the LIH Department of Infection and Immunity (DII), have been awarded financial support in the framework of the European Commission’s “Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships” funding scheme. The programme will back the scientists’ work on hypertension, receptor-chemokine interactions and Inflammatory Bowel Diseases (IBD).

Transversal Translational Medicine (TTM) at the LIH creates a translational bridge between fundamental research and the clinic so that improved/advanced diagnosis, therapy and prevention may help patients in Luxembourg and beyond.  TTM wishes to recruit a Project Manager. The incumbent will be project lead for EATRIS-plus project (50%) and other TTM research programs (50%). The aim of EATRIS-Plus is to help pooling and exploiting the translational academic capacities of the infrastructure in omic technologies to enable researchers to better address the scientific and societal challenge of personalized medicine. Additionally, the coordination office and 13 existing national nodes of the infrastructure will participate in implementing joint outreach, training, industry engagement and international collaboration activities to further build national capacity, increase users’ trust and strengthen EATRIS and the ERA global scientific leadership.

The ‘Proteomics of Cellular Signaling’ research group of the LIH Quantitative Biology Unit, led by Prof Gunnar Dittmar, has teamed up with Bruker Daltonics, a leading international manufacturer of mass spectrometers, to develop new applications for targeted proteomics on their new flagship mass spectrometer ‘TimsTOF Pro’. The goal of this collaboration, which saw the endowment of one of Bruker’s novel mass spectrometers to the research group, is to develop new targeted techniques to improve the measurement of diagnostic biomarkers for cancer and other diseases.

On Tuesday, January 28th 2020, Dr Anna Golebiewska, Group Leader at the NORLUX Neuro-Oncology laboratory, and Dr Johannes Meiser, Group Leader of the Cancer Metabolism Group at LIH’s Department of Oncology, received the “Legs Kanning Prize” from the association “Action Lions Vaincre le Cancer”. The prize rewards the scientific achievement of researchers who devote their career to cancer research in Luxembourg.

Interactive Training in Applied Good Clinical Practice (GCP) for Investigators & Site Personnel