The Communication team at the Luxembourg Institute of Health is pleased to announce the launch of #LIHtellmewhy, an innovative initiative of catchy cartoons aiming to explain the COVID-19 situation to young children aged four to eight.

Since the first outbreak of the novel pneumonia (COVID-19) in Wuhan (China), a lot of conjectures have been formulated as to the origin of the causative virus, SARS-CoV-2, which is the seventh coronavirus known to infect humans.

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.

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).

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.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) coordinates a global network of measles and rubella reference laboratories. For many years, LIH has been hosting the Luxembourg National Reference Laboratory for Measles and Rubella as well as a European Regional Reference Laboratory for Measles and Rubella. The laboratory has recently been successfully accredited again based on a thorough quality assessment by WHO representatives.

The Luxembourgish non-profit association Plooschter Projet renews its financial support to leukemia research and funds a project from the TSI group of the LIH’s Department of Oncology, aiming to characterise in detail the identity and features of cells from the tumour microenvironment in chronic lymphocytic leukaemia.

The Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR) supports multi-annual thematic research programmes with its central funding instrument CORE. One research project submitted by LIH and another two developed in partnership with the Luxembourg Institute for Socio-Economic Research (LISER) and the University of Luxembourg, respectively, have been selected for this valuable third party funding by international expert committees. They shall start in early 2020.