Press and Public Relations
Press Officer and Head of Press and Public Relations
Dr. Stefanie Seltmann
© dkfz.de
Dr. Stefanie Seltmann
Im Neuenheimer Feld 28069120 Heidelberg
Phone: +49 6221 422854
Fax: +49 6221 422968
E-Mail: s.seltmann@dkfz.de
or presse@dkfz.de
Recent Press Releases
Michael Baumann, a Dresden cancer specialist, will be the new scientific director of the German Cancer Research Center.
Prof. Michael Baumann
© Philip Benjamin/NCT Dresden
The board of trustees at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg has unanimously elected Prof. Michael Baumann as chairman and scientific director of the German Cancer Research Center. Over the past years, Michael Baumann has proven to be a successful physician, cancer researcher and science manager. He has worked as the director of Radiation Therapy at the University Hospital Carl Gustav Carus, the Institute for Radiation Oncology at the Helmholtz-Center in Dresden-Rossendorf and the OncoRay-Center. The employment contract has been signed, allowing Michael Baumann to move to the German Cancer Research Center, that he will lead together with administrative director Prof. Josef Puchta, as of November 1, 2016.
Michael Baumann will step in as the successor to Prof. Michael Boutros, who temporarily held the office of Prof. Otmar D. Wiestler. Prof. Wiestler took over the position as President of the Helmholtz-Association in Berlin on September 1, 2015.
Liquid Biopsy: Level of mutated DNA in the blood corresponds to patient outcome
© Photograph by Graham Beards, distributed under a CC BY-SA 3.0 and present on Wikimedia Commons.
New findings from a scientific collaboration between the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), the National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT) Heidelberg and the Thoraxklinik Heidelberg suggest liquid biopsy as a promising tool to monitor lung cancer patient tumors early. Scientists associated liquid biopsy readouts with clinical data and were able to track tumor responses to cancer drugs in real-time. Their paper has just been published in the latest issue of Scientific Reports.
Lasker Award for Ralf Bartenschlager
© dkfz / Tobias Schwerdt
Ralf Bartenschlager, Virologist and cancer researcher at the Heidelberg University Hospital and the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) has received the Lasker-DeBakey Medical Research Award endowed with 250 000 Dollar. This prize, which is awarded annually in three categories by the Lasker Foundation in New York, is the highest distinction for medical science in the USA. Many prize winners have later gone on to receive the Nobel Prize. Bartenschlager and his group were the first to propagate the hepatitis C virus in the lab. This has made it possible to develop targeted therapies against the virus that can lead to chronic infection and cirrhosis or cancer of the liver.
