Inga Hochheiser from University Hospital Bonn receives award for her dissertation project
Last Thursday, Dr. Inga Hochheiser from the Institute of Structural Biology at the University Hospital Bonn (UKB) received the Bayer Pharmaceuticals PhD Award 2023 for the best molecular biology PhD of the past year. The Bayer Pharmaceuticals Doctoral Award is presented by the Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (GBM).
The GBM has honored the young scientist Dr. Inga Hochheiser with this year's "Bayer Pharmaceuticals Doctoral Award". The biochemist from the Institute of Structural Biology at the UKB receives the award for her research on the structure and function of an inflammatory factor involved in many chronic diseases. "In her doctoral thesis, Dr. Hochheiser has succeeded for the first time in breaking down the three-dimensional structure of the protein NLRP3 and in depicting in atomic detail the binding to an active agent that keeps the protein in an inactive state," says ImmunoSensation2 member Prof. Matthias Geyer, director of the Institute of Structural Biology at the University of Bonn. Inga Hochheiser has thus solved a 20-year-old pharmacological puzzle and shown that the drug CRID3 binds directly to the inflammatory factor NLRP3.
This opens the way to further development of pharmaceuticals that could help against inflammatory diseases such as gout, type 2 diabetes or even Alzheimer's disease. A decisive factor in this success was that Dr. Hochheiser was able to make the protein visible in elaborate experiments using cryo-electron microscopy. The award comes with prize money of 1,500 euros. The prize was awarded on the occasion of the 74th Annual Meeting of the GBM in Mosbach with the scientific topic "Immune Engineering - from Molecules to Therapeutic Approaches".
Contact
Viola Röser
Press Officer at the University Hospital Bonn (UKB)
Communications and Media Office at Bonn University Hospital
Phone: +49 228 287- 10469
E-mail: viola.roeser@ukbonn.de
