Annual reception of the Faculty of Medicine

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The Faculty of Medicine's Annual Reception 2024 took place on Saturday, July 27 in the Irenensaal at Wort und Bild Verlag in Baierbrunn. In his welcoming address, Dean Prof. Dr. Thomas Gudermann highlighted the numerous research alliances at LMU Medicine and presented new initiatives in teaching and international cooperation. He also outlined the tasks, challenges and structures of an interdisciplinary research university and pointed out that the unrestricted freedom of action for scientists in the sense of free research and teaching with funding from society can only be combined with the assumption of social responsibility.

Around 150 guests accepted the invitation and attended the festive event in the best summer weather in the representative rooms of the publishing house, which Dr. Marc Becker, grandson of the founder of the publishing house Rolf Becker, made available to the LMU faculty. The event was musically framed by Jakob Plag, clarinet and Akemi Murakami, piano.

The variety and number of awards are exemplary of the outstanding young talent and the great innovative strength of LMU Medicine. Our thanks go to the donors of the various prizes - they promote the excellent further development of LMU Medicine in research and teaching through their generous support.

Particularly noteworthy is the award of the Wolfgang Peisser Gold Medal to Prof. Dr. Peter Bartenstein, former Director of the Clinic for Nuclear Medicine at the LMU Hospital, for his special services to doctoral matters and outstanding commitment in leading the Doctoral Committee of the Faculty of Medicine over many years.

The following other prizes were awarded:

MeCuM teaching awards:

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Prof. Dr. med. Hendrik Schulze-Koops
Medical Clinic and Polyclinic IV

Dr. med. Thomas Melzer
Medical Clinic and Polyclinic V

Prof. Dr. med. Alexander Buchner
Urology Clinic and Polyclinic

Prof. Dr. med. Marcus Hentrich
Red Cross Clinic Munich

Dr. med. Heiko Trentzsch
Institute for Emergency Medicine

Harald Mückter Teaching Innovation Award

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Prof. Dr. med. Matthias Siebeck, MME
Institute for Didactics and Educational Research in Medicine

Dr. med. Anne Wöllmer
German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases
BMC (Biochemistry)

LMU Scientist of the Year award

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the awards are presented to a particularly successful young scientist (Clinician Scientist and Medical Scientist) at the Medical Faculty of the LMU Munich, based on a current, outstanding publication.

LMU Clinician Scientist 2024:
Dr. med. Laura Olbrich, DPhil
Department of Tropical and Infectious Diseases

for the publication: Diagnostic accuracy of a three-gene Mycobacterium tuberculosis host response cartridge using fingerstick blood for childhood tuberculosis: a multicentre prospective study in low-income and middle-income countries, Lancet Infectious Diseases (2023)

LMU Medical Scientist 2024:
Dr. Janina Dörr
Department of Clinical Pharmacology & Medical Clinic and Polyclinic IV

for the publication: PGE2 limits effector expansion of tumor-infiltrating stem-like CD8+ T cells, Nature (2024)

Dr. Hildegard and Heinrich Fuchs Prize

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Dr Hildegard and Heinrich Fuchs PrizeThe winners of the prize, which is endowed with 5,000 euros, are selected by the Doctoral Committee of the Faculty of Medicine from among the best ‘summa cum laude’ doctoral theses.

Dr Julian Daniel Georg Leberzammer-Deuster, MD
formerly of the Institute for Prophylaxis and Epidemiology of Circulatory Diseases (IPEK)
for the dissertation: The role of the platelet chemokine CXCL12 in arterial thrombosis and atherosclerosis

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Dr rer. nat. Anna Sophie Franziska Weiß
formerly MvPI for Hygiene and Medical Microbiology - Chair: Medical Microbiology and Hospital Hygiene
for the dissertation: Ecology of a Synthetic Gut Bacterial Community

Rolf Becker award

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Dr Zeynep Ilgın Kolabaş, Institute for Stroke and Dementia Research and Professor Dr Robert Perneczky, Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, together with Dr Adrian Gottschlich, Medical Clinic and Polyclinic III and Professor Dr Sebastian Kobold, Department of Clinical Pharmacology, were awarded the Rolf Becker Prize 2024 by the LMU Faculty of Medicine and the ‘Rufzeichen Gesundheit!’ foundation in Baierbrunn. Baierbrunn were honoured. The prize is endowed with a total of 50,000 euros and honours the best original work resulting from a research project in the field of experimental or clinical medicine at LMU in 2023 or 2024.

The scientific work by Dr Kolabaş and Professor Perneczky was published in the renowned journal Cell in August 2023. The researchers were able to show that the skull bone harbours unique neutrophil immune cells, a type of white blood cell that plays a crucial role in the immune system's defence, thus revealing a potential new starting point for the diagnosis and treatment of neurological diseases. According to the authors, brain inflammation could possibly be monitored in future by scanning the surface of the patient's head.

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The research results of Dr Gottschlich and Prof. Dr Kobold on new targets against acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) were published in March 2023 in the renowned journal Nature Biotechnology. Unlike other forms of blood cancer, acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) cannot currently be treated with the innovative CAR T-cell immunotherapy. The reason: there is a lack of specific molecular targets with which certain immune cells could specifically attack AML cells - so that the immune system actually attacks the cancer. With the help of AI-supported analysis, the research teams of Prof Dr Kobold and Dr Gottschlich, together with teams led by Dr Carsten Marr and Moritz Thomas from the Institute of AI for Health at Helmholtz Munich, have now been able to identify two candidates from 25,000 potential cell surface molecules.

Titles of the original papers

Lacher SB, Dörr J, de Almeida GP, Hönninger J, Bayerl F, Hirschberger A, Pedde AM, Meiser P, Ramsauer L, …, Böttcher JP
PGE2 limits effector expansion of tumour-infiltrating stem-like CD8+ T cells
Nature, 2024

Olbrich L, Verghese VP, Franckling-Smith Z, Sabi I, Ntinginya NE, Mfinanga A, Banze D, Viegas S, Khosa C, …, Heinrich N
Diagnostic accuracy of a three-gene Mycobacterium tuberculosis host response cartridge using fingerstick blood for childhood tuberculosis: a multicentre prospective study in low-income and middle-income countries
Lancet Infectious Diseases, 2023

Z I Kolabas , L B Kuemmerle , R Perneczky , B Förstera, S Ulukaya, M Ali, S Kapoor , L M Bartos , M Büttner , O S Caliskan , Z Rong, H Mai , ... , A Erturk
Distinct molecular profiles of skull bone marrow in health and neurological disorders
Cell, 2023

Gottschlich A, Thomas M, Grünmeier R, Lesch S, Rohrbacher L, Igl V, Briukhovetska D, Benmebarek MR, Vick B, […], Kobold S.
Single-cell transcriptomic atlas-guided development of CAR-T cells for the treatment of acute myeloid leukemia.
Nat Biotechnol. 2023 Mar 13.