A great honor for Dr. rer. nat. Linda Steinacher: As part of the graduation ceremony of Hannover Medical School (MHH) last Friday, she was awarded one of the two doctoral prizes of the Society of Friends of MHH e.V., each worth €2,500. Out of 151 doctoral graduates, only two received this special distinction for outstanding scientific achievements.

Dr. Steinacher completed her doctoral studies with a dissertation conducted in collaboration between MHH, the Fraunhofer Institute for Toxicology and Experimental Medicine ITEM, and F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG in Basel. The work was supervised by Dr. Lauriane Cabon (Roche) and Prof. Dr. Armin Braun (Fraunhofer ITEM).

Immune organoids help to understand the side effects of active substances
Dr. rer. nat. Linda Steinacher received her doctorate with a thesis on "Investigating Drug-Induced Immune-Related Adverse Events in Human Barrier Organs Using Advanced Immunocompetent Organoid Models". In her dissertation, Dr Steinacher deals with the development of so-called immune organoids.

Background: Modern immunotherapies, such as those used in cancer treatment, can cause new and previously unknown side effects. In order to be able to better investigate and treat these, realistic models are required that replicate human organs and their immune systems as accurately as possible. In recent years, so-called organoids have been developed for this purpose. These are small, laboratory-grown mini-organs that imitate human tissue. However, organoids usually only consist of a few organ-specific cells and do not have a realistic immune function.

This is where Dr Steinacher's research comes in. As the tissue-specific immune system plays an important role in the occurrence of side effects, she and her team developed new models for the intestine and lungs that contain immune cells. To this end, the researchers obtained both the typical cells of the respective organs and the appropriate immune cells from fresh human tissue donations. In the next step, these were cultivated together to create so-called immune organoids. With the help of these models, the research group was able to investigate the effect of various immune-based cancer therapies in more detail and better understand the reaction of the immune system in the lungs and intestines to certain drugs. The immune organoids will support the development of new, even more effective drugs, as they help to recognize the immune-mediated side effects of new active substances at an early stage.

We warmly congratulate Dr. Linda Steinacher on this special award and wish her continued success! Our congratulations also go to Dr. Shen Zhong, who was likewise honored with doctoral prize for her outstanding research on gender-specific differences in lung cancer.