news 2023

Medicine & Science The cancer therapy of the future is increasingly customised in the sense of precision medicine. The basis for this is comprehensive "profiling" of each individual tumour, which extensively analyses the genetic make-up of the individual tumour at molecular level. This "comprehensive cancer profiling" is already being used at the Comprehensive Cancer Center Vienna (CCC) of MedUni Vienna and Vienna General Hospital for all types of cancer and permits the identification of changes in a tumour that argue for or against the use of a particular therapy.

Medicine & Science Alcohol-related liver disease is among the most common causes of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Due to an incomplete understanding of the factors contributing to disease development, liver transplantation is still the only available cure. A team led by Tim Hendrikx from MedUni Vienna's Department of Laboratory Medicine has now uncovered a new mechanism that plays an important role in the progression of the disease.

Medicine & Science Using prenatal magnetic resonance imaging, a group of MedUni Vienna researchers examined the placentas and foetuses of women who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 during pregnancy. Their research results demonstrate that the different strains of the virus that emerged during the pandemic led to varying degrees of damage: especially involving pre-Omicron variants, the detected placental lesions could potentially harm both development and health in some of the affected unborn children.

Medicine & Science Christoph Bock's team at the CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Artificial Intelligence of MedUni Vienna established a catalog of DNA methylation across 580 animal species. These data ena-bled a detailed dissection of the evolution of epigenetic regulation and the epigenome.

Medicine & Science Medical science has not yet been able to explain why the Epstein-Barr virus triggers infectious mononucleosis (IM) in some people with initial infections and not in others. But now, a research team led by Elisabeth Puchhammer-Stöckl, head of the Center for Virology at MedUni Vienna, has identified a specific immune response to the virus as the cause, and as a potential target for the development of vaccines.

A MedUni Vienna research team has discovered a highly potent biomarker for clinical response to CAR-T cell therapy, describing the prerequisites for optimal use of this novel therapy for lymphoma treatment. The current findings are an essential step forward towards optimizing this promising therapy.

Cervical cancer is the cancer with the fourth highest mortality rate among women worldwide. Locally advanced cervical cancer (LACC) is treated with a combination of external and internal radiotherapy (brachytherapy) and chemotherapy. For the first time, a study conducted by a research group at the Comprehensive Cancer Centre Vienna of MedUni Vienna and Vienna General Hospital using data from the multicentre EMBRACE-I trial demonstrated the superiority of a targeted approach in brachytherapy.