With its ERC Starting Grants, the European Research Council (ERC) supports talented young scientists. The funds of 1.5 million euros for up to five years are intended to support the establishment of an independent working group at a renowned research institution in the EU. The ERC Starting Grants are awarded in a highly competitive procedure. Only one in ten applicants is successful.
One of the young talents selected this year is Pei-Chi Wei, who was born in Taiwan. She receives the ERC grants to study the role of DNA breaks in developmental processes and in brain diseases. Under the stress of rapid and frequent cell division, a cell's DNA can literally break. To form the 80 billion neurons of the human brain, stem and progenitor cells must divide tens of thousands of times. While changes in DNA increase genomic diversity in the brain, they can also lead to diseases. Wei would like to better understand the origin of DNA breaks and find out whether their damage or benefit outweighs their effect. Her experiments are designed to show how cell division-related stress affects neuronal precursor cells, whether it triggers DNA breaks and what influence these breaks have on brain development. With these experiments Wei hopes to gain insights into neuropsychiatric disorders and the development of brain tumors.
Wei studied zoology and immunology in Taiwan before she received her PhD from the Taiwan National Defense Center. Afterwards she worked at the Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan, the Boston Children's Hospital, and at Harvard Medical School. Since 2019 she has been heading a junior research group at DKFZ as a Helmholtz Young Investigator.
The physician Darjus Tschaharganeh plans to investigate the effects of altered copy numbers in tumor genomes on the course of cancer development. In this frequently occurring phenomenon, entire chromosome arms are deleted or duplicated. This can affect hundreds of genes simultaneously and influence the biological properties as well as the therapy of the tumor. Until now, there has been a lack of suitable methods to study such genome alterations. Tschaharganeh now wants to use the CRISPR “gene scissors“ to approach the topic from two sides. On the one hand, he plans to delete entire chromosome segments in liver organoids. Organoids are three-dimensionally growing cells that form a “miniature liver“ in the culture dish, which reproduces the organ in its structure and function. On the other hand, novel mouse models will provide information on the effects of the duplication of cancer-driving genes.
Tschaharganeh studied human medicine in Rostock and Aachen. After research stays at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and the university hospitals in Heidelberg and Aachen, he has been heading a junior research group as Helmholtz Young Investigator at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and the Institute of Pathology at Heidelberg University Hospital since 2016.
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