ERC Consolidator Grant for Ralf Jungmann
Ralf Jungmann, head of the research group "Molecular Imaging and Bionanotechnology" receives ERC Consolidator Grant
Ralf Jungmann, head of the research group “Molecular Imaging and Bionanotechnology” at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried and Professor for Experimental Biophysics at the LMU Munich receives the Consolidator Grant of the European Research Council. It comes with funding of 2.3 million Euros over five years. With his team, Jungmann aims to develop novel imaging technologies to unravel how the nanoscale organization of surface proteins on immune and tumor cells dictates their decision-making processes. The techniques could yield fundamental insights into the molecular architecture of immune cell interactions and enable the future development of more refined “pattern”-based immunotherapeutics. One of the major aims of many therapeutics is targeting cell surface proteins to alter cellular behavior. Recently approved immunotherapeutic drugs trigger anti-tumor immunity by disrupting key cell surface proteins that guide immune cell interactions.
Despite the cell surface representing a major site of drug action, its nanoscale organization remains poorly characterized. “The main reason for this is largely due to technical limitations of fluorescence imaging approaches” says Jungmann. “Current techniques do not allow high-throughput measurements of the spatial localization and interaction of hundreds of proteins with true single-protein-resolution on cell surfaces”, Jungmann continues. With the ERC Consolidator Grant “ReceptorPAINT – Imaging Receptomics as a tool for biomedical discovery”, his research team aims to develop novel imaging technologies based on DNA-PAINT microscopy to enable the visualization and quantification of all relevant cell surface proteins at single-protein-resolution.