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Possible SARS-CoV-2 mass testing with new technology

Prof. Dr. Jonathan Schmid-Burgk heads the new working group for "Functional Immunogenomics" at the Institute for Clinical Chemistry and Clinical Pharmacology at the University Hospital Bonn. As part of the newly established professorship and management position, the 34-year-old genome researcher is investigating the complex interplay between genes and our immune system. With the help of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI), he is developing new techniques for protein analysis in living human cells with programmable gene scissors. The aim is to accelerate the modification of the human genome in order to analyze it. Prof. Schmid-Burgk is currently working on a mass test for COVID-19 using the LAMP-Seq process he developed. He brings his new techniques to the Cluster of Excellence ImmunoSensation at the University of Bonn. Following his doctorate, for which he received the doctoral award from the Bonn University Society in 2017, his previous academic career led Prof. Schmid-Burgk to Cambridge (USA). There he spent three and a half years researching at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard - funded by a grant from the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO).

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New test points to precision treatment for autoimmune condition

—Interferon alpha is an inflammatory mediator that can cause Sjögren’s syndrome, an autoimmune disease. This is revealed in a recent study carried out by the University Hospital Bonn together with the University of Bonn, the University of Edinburgh and Newcastle University. Their findings, which have been published in the journal “Lancet Rheumatology,” could make it easier in the medium term to develop drugs to fight this chronic condition.
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Making Cancer Cells More Predictable: PRECISE Aims to Forecast Therapeutically Actionable Vulnerabilities

—Which genes and signaling pathways does a cancer cell require to survive? And which of these could serve as therapeutic targets? The pan-European initiative PRECISE aims to identify such vulnerabilities not only through labor-intensive laboratory experiments but also by predicting them using computational models. The UKB and the University of Bonn, represented by Prof. Dr. Maximilian Billmann and Prof. Dr. Jonathan Schmid-Burgk, are among the founding partners of the consortium. The scientific vision of the initiative has now been published in a commentary in Nature Genetics.
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Focus on the Guardians of the Antibody Response

—For the immune system to effectively combat pathogens, antibody responses must be precisely controlled. So-called follicular regulatory T cells (Tfr cells) play a key role in this process by limiting excessive immune responses and helping to maintain immune tolerance. Researchers at the University Hospital Bonn (UKB) and the University of Bonn have now developed a robust laboratory method that allows Tfr cells to be generated from precursor cells and studied in a targeted manner. The results were recently published in the journal Cellular & Molecular Immunology.
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