German Research Foundation and the state of Rhineland-Palatinate provide funding for the Mainz Screening Center
01.02.2010
The German Research Foundation (DFG) and the German federal state of Rhineland-Palatinate have provided funding of approximately EUR 360,000 for the establishment of a high-throughput screening center at the Mainz University Medical Center designed to discover new therapeutic agents. At the future Mainz Screening Center (MSC) it will be possible to test thousands of substances in a relatively short time in the search for new drugs and to identify new mechanisms of action of disease-relevant active substances that can be exploited therapeutically. The MSC will be the first and only institution of its kind in Rhineland-Palatinate; there are currently only eight such centers throughout Germany. Professor Roland Stauber, head of the Molecular and Cellular Oncology unit at the Mainz University Medical Center's Department of Otorhinolaryngology, Head, and Neck Surgery will be in charge of the new center.
"Tumor illnesses still represent a major challenge to medicine in general and to medical research in particular. Since we can achieve therapeutic progress only if we understand the underlying cellular mechanisms, I am pleased that the Mainz University Medical Center, with funding from the German Research Foundation, will provide an effective instrument for exploring these mechanisms," said the Chief Scientific Officer of the Mainz University Medical Center, Professor Reinhard Urban.
The use of new microscopy techniques, in combination with special robotic systems, makes it possible to identify substances with therapeutic potential from among many thousands of chemical substances. This search for the proverbial needle in a haystack is called high-throughput screening, and it allows thousands of substances to be automatically tested each day.
In Mainz, the planned MSC will be accessible to various user groups both at the Mainz University Medical Center and Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) as well as in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate. In addition to being involved in university-based projects at the Mainz University Medical Center and the JGU institutes of Biology, Chemistry, and Pharmaceutical Sciences, the new center will also be collaborating with the new Institute of Molecular Biology, an excellence center for life sciences sponsored by the Boehringer Ingelheim Foundation, and the Institute of Biotechnology and Drug Research in Kaiserslautern. The wide range of potential clinical and application-relevant theoretical developments covers use in a vast range of fields, from academic and industry-related drug search to the research of nanotechnology-based diagnosis and treatment strategies.
The first results obtained in the field of translational research at the Department of Molecular and Cellular Oncology have already been published in the journal Sensors. "With the establishment of the Mainz Screening Center, a dream of mine which began 10 years ago has now come true," emphasized Professor Roland Stauber, the initiator of the Mainz Screening Center. "This technology has already enabled us to identify previously unknown candidate agents with potential tumor-suppressing activity from among tens of thousands of chemical substances. The MSC represents an important step towards developing these into potential anticancer drugs."
"We particularly welcome the establishment of the Mainz Screening Center, especially in connection with the formation of our Institute of Molecular Biology. This technology is yet another important component that will ensure that Mainz as a science hub develops into an internationally leading center for molecular medicine," said the President of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Professor Georg Krausch.