Press Officer and Head of Press and Public Relations
Im Neuenheimer Feld 280
69120 Heidelberg
Phone: +49 6221 422854
Fax: +49 6221 422968
E-Mail: s.seltmann@dkfz.de
or presse@dkfz.de
Recent Press Releases
DKTK Frankfurt: German Cancer Award for Simone Fulda
Joint press release of the German Consortium for Translational Cancer Research and the University Hospital Frankfurt
Professor Simone Fulda, a pediatrician and cancer researcher in the German Consortium for Translational Cancer Research (DKTK) of the University Cancer Center (UCT) of the University Hospital Frankfurt, has been honored with the 2014 Cancer Research Award in the category “Translational Research.”
New vaccine against papillomaviruses protects mice from skin cancer
Scientists have suspected that non-melanoma skin cancer in patients who have received organ transplants can be caused not only by UV radiation, but also by simultaneous infection with specific types of human papillomaviruses (HPV). Scientists from the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and the Charité University Hospital Berlin have now used a vaccine for the first time to protect mice against such skin tumors. The vaccine is even effective in animals with suppressed immune systems and mice that have previously been infected with papillomaviruses.
DNA tags as targets for new therapy against brain cancer
Ependymoma is an aggressive type of brain cancer that primarily affects infants. A comprehensive molecular analysis of these tumors has now been carried out with the major participation of scientists from the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and Heidelberg University Hospital. They discovered that ependymomas with a good prognosis differ significantly from those with a poor prognosis. In aggressively growing tumors, a large number of genes are turned off as a result of methylation, a particular type of chemical change involving DNA. Drugs can remove methyl tags and this slows down the growth of cancer cells. The scientists have published their findings in the latest issue of Nature.
