New ERC Grants at LMU

Prof. Dr. med. Dr. sc. nat. Anna-Sophia Wahl is Professor of Neuroanatomy at the Chair II Anatomy and research group leader in the Institute for Stroke and Dementia Research (ISD) at LMU University Hospital. In addition, she is a member of the SyNergy Cluster of Excellence. Her main research interest focuses on understanding cellular mechanisms of repair in the brain after injury (e.g. a stroke) and how these mechanisms can be further enhanced to promote recovery of lost brain functions.

The brain possesses the remarkable ability to launch self-repair mechanisms after damage – a prerequisite for the restoration of lost functions. In the ARISE (Activate Repair In StrokE) project, Anna-Sophia Wahl wants to discover fundamental principles how the brain orchestrates the cellular response and how it can be further improved. Using state- of the art imaging technology and artificial intelligence, she plans to experimentally discover how individual neurons recode and reconnect after an injury, why some of them take part in repair processes while others do not, and how neural rewiring can be stimulated to promote the recovery of impaired functions.

“With the ARISE project, I will develop a novel experimental strategy to identify cellular mechanisms of neural repair which is the basis to develop novel approaches for chronic impairment after stroke,” says the neuroscientist. To study damage, repair, and behavior in connection with each other, she uses a mouse model she developed especially for this purpose. “This approach will also enable me to apply mathematical models which evaluate the efficiency of novel rehabilitation therapies for strokes and predict their results.”

Prof. Carolin Wendling has been a Professor of Medical Microbiology and Hospital Hygiene at the Max von Pettenkofer Institute since April 2024. Her research focuses on the evolutionary changes in bacteria and their impact on pathogenicity and antibiotic resistance. She secured her grant through Helmholtz Munich, where she will conduct parts of her research.

The global rise in antibiotic resistant bacteria is a significant threat, making the exploration of alternative treatment options essential. One promising approach is the use of bacteriophages, viruses that infect and kill bacteria. However, the wide-spread use of phage-therapy, despite its century-old practice, has not become widely established. This is due to several limitations, among others the time-consuming process of identifying suitable phages and limited in-vivo efficacy of orally administered phages.

With her project PHAGE-PRO (Advancing Phage Therapy through Synergistic Strategies: Phage-Mediated Killing and Competitive Exclusion Using Engineered Prophages), Carolin Wendling aims to overcome these shortcomings by using so-called prophages, viral DNA integrated in bacterial genomes, instead of conventional lytic phages. Wendling will incorporate these prophages into probiotics, thereby enhancing their in vivo efficacy. By leveraging machine learning for phage identification Wendling further aims to establish a platform that will rapidly identify suitable phages. The ultimate core advantage of her innovative approach is the dual action of direct bacterial killing by phages and competitive exclusion by probiotics.

“Although I initially tailored PHAGE-PRO to treat Salmonella infections in poultry, its impact extends far beyond,” says Wendling. “This new technology holds the potential not only to advance infection management in livestock farming, but also opens the door for targeted preventive and therapeutic interventions in human medicine.”

Dr. Anna Schroeder previously worked at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research and the University of Freiburg and will move to LMU in April 2025 as a Professor of Systemic Neuroscience.

To survive, you must adapt your behavior accurately and rapidly to your environment. In a world where our physiological needs and surrounding environment are ever changing, one wrong move could make the difference between life and death. How does the brain successfully compute changes in internal state and external cues, while factoring in experience, to drive the most appropriate behavioral outcome from moment-to-moment?

Mounting evidence suggests that the zona incerta, a little studied brain region, is a central switchboard for such adaptive behavior. This subthalamic nucleus has widespread connections and was recently found to regulate an astounding range of behaviors critical for survival including defense, sleep, feeding and much more. It also encodes associated changes in internal states, such as anxiety, fatigue and hunger, and integrates sensory inputs across modalities. These features suggest that a central function of the zona incerta might be to locally compute needed transitions in behavior based on internal state changes, which are then broadcast to downstream targets to convert this into action.

Anna Schroeder will address this hypothesis in her project CERTASTATES (internal state drivers of behavioral flexibility and their underlying neural circuitry in the zona incerta). To achieve this, she will employ cutting-edge molecular, circuit tracing, recording and in vivo imaging technologies in mice together with diverse behavioral paradigms and rich behavioral state readouts. The ultimate objective is to uncover how distinct internal state changes are processed in defined cell types and circuits, how they drive behavioral flexibility and how they are influenced by deep brain stimulation, motivated by the fact that the zona incerta is one of few established targets in humans for this therapeutic approach. Together, this work will advance our understanding of how neural circuits generate internal states, and in turn process, broadcast and use this information to guide adaptive behavior. Moreover, it will open an entry point for translation by exploring how clinically-applied neuromodulation can transform these vital computations.