Two LMU scholars receive funding of over a million euros each

The German Research Foundation (DFG) has awarded Reinhart Koselleck funding to two LMU researchers. The grants are worth 1.25 million euros each. Since 2002, this funding has been given annually to just a handful of established scholars at research institutions throughout Germany. It supports particularly innovative and promising projects in all academic fields.

Indigenous concepts in the climate crisis

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Prof. Eveline Dürr is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology. Her main research interests include environment and society, urban anthropology and cultural identities.

In her new project “Planetary healing as transformative process: a decolonial approach to the challenges of climate change,” Eveline Dürr draws on the findings of current research on human-environment relations in times of climate change and connects to the view of understanding the devastation of the Anthropocene as a planetary crisis. Instead of focusing on resilience and the adaptation of particularly affected groups, however, this project proposes a new approach of “planetary healing.” It brings into focus indigenous practices of healing that link different scales and address individual as well as collective and environmental dimensions. These are explicitly related to the challenges of climate change and to ongoing coloniality, but also to decolonization.

Eveline Dürr sees (de)colonization and healing practices as a driving force for social transformation. Such (de)colonizing processes are particularly visible in Latin America, where new normative claims, for example with regard to the legal system as well as to social life (buen vivir, conviviality), have already found social expression. Drawing on several case studies and applying specific ethnographic methods, the planetary healing approach will be developed and overarching concepts, narratives, and imaginaries will be identified. This will generate insights that point beyond the local framework in each case study and will stimulate interdisciplinary dialogue.

New approaches to combat acute myeloid leukemia

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Prof. Irmela Jeremias is a pediatrician at LMU’s Dr. von Hauner Children’s Hospital and researcher at Helmholtz Munich.

Acute myeloid leukemia, a common form of blood cancer, remains an often deadly disease despite significant advances in recent years. Even with the aid of modern treatment strategies, doctors are often unable to suppress the disease in the long term. The research group led by Prof. Irmela Jeremias is therefore searching for new targets to attack aggressive leukemias.

Although new therapies are urgently needed, development processes are very costly and time consuming. To date, few drugs have been successfully carried from preclinical research to clinical application. A primary goal of the project “Identifying novel targeted therapies for cancer using CRISPR/Cas9 dropout screens in PDX models in vivo” is to make this process more efficient and prioritize effective therapeutic targets. The main tool used in the project is the patient-derived mouse model for acute leukemia, which simulates the situation in patients very well. This involves taking isolated tumor cells from patients and transplanting them into mice, where they engraft and grow in the bone marrow – just as they do in humans.

These tumor cells can be modified in the laboratory, allowing scientists to conduct a wide variety of functional investigations of the cells in their natural environment. For example, they can study the roles of certain genes in the cancer cells and identify those genes that are essential for the tumor’s survival. In previous studies, the team had already demonstrated that work with genetically modified models can discover promising new tumor weaknesses in vivo that would have remained hidden in pure cell culture work. Modern screening methods allow scientists to test hundreds of genes simultaneously here.

Now the researchers aim to use these techniques to investigate in particular those weaknesses that can be attacked by existing drugs and active compounds. The efficiency of these agents will subsequently be tested in preclinical studies in mouse models. “With our translational approach, we can find new therapeutic targets for successful leukemia therapies that can be quickly translated into clinical application,” Irmela Jeremias points out.

See also: Atherosclerosis research - Christian Weber receives Reinhart Koselleck Award